Rakumi Arts International with the generous support of the Ford Foundation has initiated a project to provide the tools, training, and vehicle to harness the power of the Internet for the benefit of artists in Nigeria. This project, called Nigeria-arts.net, will help artists to expand audiences, define new markets for their creative products, take the first steps towards crossing the digital divide and network globally through the power of the Internet. In Nigeria, as in much of Africa, limited access to computers, telephones and the high cost of communications has left artists isolated from much of the world. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, a mere 700,000 telephone lines are shared by over 110 million citizens. Internet access is even more rarified. The cost of a single dial up email account can be as high as $200 per month, where the average per capita income is $300 per year.

Nigeria’s capital city of Lagos, once the arts and commerce center of West Africa, still teems with artists of all disciplines. As in most African nations, these artists fend for themselves, having to establish their own galleries, record companies, distributing companies, and so forth, making it difficult to promote their work locally and abroad. The internet has provided music of the world with affordable and powerful new tools for networking, promotion, marketing and communications, giving unheralded opportunities for artists in Western nations. This revolution has, thus far, bypassed artists in Africa.

Over the last few years Rakumi Arts Executive Director, Andrew Frankel has spoken to Nigerian artists in a wide range of disciplines about the arts industry, their business needs, and the potential of the Internet. Several responses continually surfaced. There is a high degree of awareness of the Internet’s existence, but very little direct experience with it, due to expensive user fees and unreliable access centers. Rakumi Arts is committed to bringing the power of the Internet to support the endeavors of artists in Nigeria through Nigeria-arts.net. Using the simplest tools of email and http, Nigerian artists will find themselves back in touch with a world-wide market, which has increasingly evaded them for the past 20 years.

This November, Rakumi Arts will open a branch office in Lagos and the Nigeria-arts.net cyber center will come on line. The seemingly simple project will focus on two core challenges, communications and promotion. The communications challenge will be addressed through the implementation of a web-mail system. As we go to print with this Rakumi Fall Newsletter, final configurations are being completed for mail.nigeria-arts.net, a web mail server. Hosted from Rakumi’s offices, the web mail server will provide free and stable email access through the World Wide Web to over 5,000 Nigerian artists in the coming year. An equally large challenge is posed for the Lagos office in attempting to create and maintain stable access where both the telecom and electricity are unreliable. Using generators, and a wireless microwave-to-satellite, Nigeria-arts.net will endeavor to have a stable and an always-on internet connection for Nigeria’s artists to access. By using web-mail, Nigeria’s artists will be able to take their mail with them and access email from anywhere on the planet.

Our second challenge is to create a simple and powerful promotional vehicle, which will promote artists’ work and be accessible even when the artists themselves are not. Using ASP technologies and database driven pages, we will create a simple interface where each artist can have a consistent and informative page which will promote their work and tie in to the work of other Nigerian artists. Each page will include a biography, work samples and contact information, as well as an email link to each participating artist. However, building the websystem is only the public part of the process, the real project is in training artists in digital technologies. The modest lab, which will be housed in Rakumi’s Lagos office, will feature digital audio, as well as video and image manipulation tools. These tools will be used to teach artists about digital media, and to help them digitize their works for use on the Internet. For each artistic discipline we will have digital tools to enhance the artist’s ability to reach out.