St Helena is a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean, one of the most remote ones in the world. It is a British overseas territory with a population of 4,000 people, who are dependent on budgetary aids from the United Kingdom (currently more than £11.5 million per year) and from the European Union (currently € 3.1 million per year through the 10th European Development Fund) as the island has a very weak economy.
The average salary is £4,500 per year while food and fuel cost more than in the UK. Due to a lack of economic prospects 20% of the island’s population have already emigrated during the last ten years. In order to strengthen the local economy the government intends to establish and promote tourism on the island. A starting point is the imminent construction of an airport.
Today St Helena’s only link to the outside world is a Royal Mail Ship that travels 5 days to Cape Town, South Africa and supplies all goods for the island’s community. The only internet connection of the island isn’t fast either: 4,000 people share a satellite link of 10 MBit/s. This compares to an average bandwidth of 5.2 MBit/s of a single UK household. As a result internet access is not only very slow but also very expensive. On top of that this satellite link is unreliable due to frequent sun outages which are likely to occur even more frequently due to expected increasing solar flares. Also with local and international telephone calls costing £0.10 and £1.00 per minute, respectively, telephone service is prohibitively expensive and, like internet access, unreliable.
As a consequence the people of St Helena are practically excluded from any benefits associated with today’s information society. Establishing tourism with such telecommunication infrastructure will face serious difficulties. One IT expert believes he has found a solution and has set up a website to explain the proposal.
Christian von der Ropp, an independent IT-consultant from Germany, who has never been to St Helena but nevertheless became fascinated by this beautiful remote island and its small population - through information found on the internet. He became aware of St Helena’s problematic telecommunication infrastructure by a friend, Thomas Fledrich, a German space scientist who had lived on St Helena for a year during 2009. When coincidentally learning about the plans for the South Atlantic Express cable he realized the opportunities a landing of the cable could bring to this isolated island and decided to campaign for it. Christian quickly found support from A Human Right, a UN-supported NGO dedicated to closing the digital divide by connecting those 5 billion deprived people without internet access.
During 2012 one of the world’s fastest submarine optic fibre cables called South Atlantic Express (SAex) will be laid from South Africa to Brazil providing 12.8 TBit/s of total bandwidth. Since this cable and the WASACE South cable, which will unfortunately run far north from St Helena, are expected to saturate bandwidth demand on the South Atlantic route for the next decades, this cable is a unique opportunity to bring enormous internet bandwidth to St Helena.
Routing the South Atlantic Express cable via St Helena would probably increase cable length by just some 50km and would even provide technical benefits for the cable operator as St Helena could feed-in electric power to the cable’s repeaters required every 100km. Furthermore a landing point at St Helena would allow laying a future branch to São Paulo, Brazil’s economic centre, so the cable operator could offer the shortest route from the São Paulo region to Angola and South Africa while also having a redundant route from São Paulo via St Helena to Fortaleza.
I encourage all of you to promote this campaign, and help the people of this beautiful island in the South Atlantic to keep in touch with their family and friends around the world, and to have all the online benefits most of us take for granted nowadays. The campaign website has some suggestions about how you can help.
on Jan 19th, 2012 at 19:31
Andy,
Thanks for your support of this project. I had the pleasure of visiting St. Helena in 2010 while on a Queen Mary 2 cruise. I discussed the possibility of Radio St. Helena streaming its programming with Tony Moore and Gary Walters, the station manager. At the time it was more than their budget allowed but they expressed hope that they might do so in the future.
The children of St. Helena had the day off from school that day as their school busses were pressed into service hauling tourists around the island. The children could be seen all over Jamestown “hanging out” with nothing else to do. It is no wonder they move on to greener pastures when they get out of school. There is no way for most of them to support themselves.
The economy is in dire need of a boost to prevent the society from disintegrating altogether in a few more years. The new airport will help. The new internet connection, if implemented, will also help. Today the main exports from the island are young people and postage stamps for the philatelic hobbyists of the world.
Hopefully the new connections to the outside world will allow St. Helena to join the rest of us and participate in the good things modern society offers. Of course with that come the dangers that modern society can expose a very peaceful place to. Lets hope the positive things prevail.
Joe Buch
on Jan 20th, 2012 at 12:09
This sounds like a fine project. But I must add that with 4,250 euros of the financial assistance per head annually, St. Helena is perhaps the least self-sustainable place in the world… In 2011, the UK government announced it would invest in a £200m (!) airport on the island.
I believe a more realistic project would be setting up a resettlement foundation and then selling or leasing out the island to whomever is interested.
on Jan 20th, 2012 at 12:35
The airport is the key to the whole thing. At the moment, they get less than 1,000 tourists a year. When the airport opens, they hope to get 30,000. This will make a huge difference to the island economy. The plan is to make the island self-sustaining, so in the long term financial assistance from the UK is not needed.
I strongly disagree with your resettlement proposal. It brings back ugly memories of what happened to the people of Diego Garcia, when Harold Wilson lied to the UK parliament in order to get approval to lease the island to the US. Simon Winchester’s book Outposts revealed the whole story, and it’s not over because the people who were forcibly resettled were sent to Mauritius, where they were never accepted. They have no cultural ties with Mauritius. Some committed suicide, and many of those who are left are still living in poverty in a country they don’t want to be in.
200 million pounds is actually a modest investment compared to the billions the UK government plans to spend on a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham. These are UK citizens, and they have human rights. Enforced resettlement is an outrageous thing to do unless it’s done to protect the health or safety of those being resettled. Doing it for money, as Harold Wilson’s government did, is immoral.
As Joe points out, there are risks attached to the building of an airport. The islanders know this, and I have been impressed by the attitude of the company contracted to build it. Within days of the papers being signed in London, they had some people on the island who are organising lots of public meetings to give every islander the chance to raise issues that concern them, and they will employ as many of the islanders as possible in the construction of the airport.
As for the risk of tourists flooding in and spoiling the lifestyle of the islanders, a colleague pointed out that the sort of tourists who will go there are not likely to be going just for a holiday, but because they are genuinely interested in St Helena. Hopefully the numbers - predicted at 30,000 a year because there will only be a few flights a week - will be manageable.
on Jan 20th, 2012 at 13:30
Andy, according to Wikipedia, back in 1981 the islanders lost their status as “Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies” and thus lost the right of abode in Britain.
I don’t propose forced resettlement but rather financial and legal assistance to those who wish to move to more promising places. From 1990s EU, Nordic Council and World Bank have been the vocal supporters of North Russia resettlement project. They financed a move for tens of thousands people. Wouldn’t it be fair to offer similar assistance to those who are stuck on St. Helena?
on Jan 20th, 2012 at 13:51
Yes, you’re correct about “right of abode”, but the islanders can still hold UK passports as well as St Helena passports. In fact, the issuing of St Helena passports has been temporarily suspended pending installation of new equipment that supports the latest electronic technology used at some airports. Those people who have to leave the island in the meantime are being urged to take a UK passport with them to avoid lengthy immigration delays. There was a long interview about this on Saint FM a few weeks ago.
on Jan 20th, 2012 at 15:35
Today’s issue of the St Helena Indpendent reveals that the future airport in St Helena - due to its short runway - will probably be reachable only by few rare types of aircraft like the Boeing 737-700ER which has few seats (thus high ticket prices on such a long distance) and is only owned by a single Japanese airlines. Further in Southern Africa there is a lack of pilots qualified for so-called ETOPS flights. Under these circumstances bringing 30,000 tourists to the island yearly will be rather difficult.
The author of the article believes the intention behind the construction of the airport is a rather strategic one linked to the Falkland conflict.
So I wouldn’t expect too much from tourism.
I further doubt that the SAex cable will come as funding will be difficult and even if so few will be able to afford internet access as long as a highly subsidized profit-oriented monopolist seeks profits from this tiny, isolated and socially deprived population. What they need is a non-profit provider but the government probably won’t dare removing C&W from the island.