Access to locally generated sites is very slow. Improvement of infrastructure is a national issue which has to be tackled by government. As far as content is concerned, local academics should be proactively involved in producing web content. UZ has fantastic archives and we should be looking at how to put these on to the Internet. At the moment, if you search for University of Zimbabwe on the web, you reach an enterprising former student in California who has set up a website - this kind of failing to make the most of own resources needs to be addressed.
Internet culture needs to be integrated into education from primary school upwards.
We also need to think how the Internet can be used to uplift our communities and to win international acknowledgement. The Zimbabwe Scientific Association, which marked its centenary in 1999, publishes Transactions , a refereed journal founded in 1902, and Zimbabwe Science News , a more popular journal. Both have local, regional and overseas subscribers. Current problems include the spiralling costs of production, leading to issue irregularity, quality decline, loss of subscribers and the beginnings of a downward spiral. The Internet offers a way of improving viability, though not necessarily directly.