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African Internet Connectivity

UNPLUGGED: Wiring Africa

The so-called Digital Divide is at its most extreme in Africa, where the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is still at a very early stage of development compared to other regions of the world. Mike Jensen (ZA), speaker at this year's Ars Electronica Festival, gives a status report on connectivity in Africa.

An update by Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber

Mike Jensen is a South African independent consultant with experience in over 30 countries in Africa assisting in the establishment of information and communications systems during the last 15 years. In South Africa he works with international development agencies, the private sector, NGOs and governments assisting them in the formulation, management and evaluation of their Internet projects. He is member of the African Conference of Ministers' High Level Working Group which developed the African Information Society Initiative (AISI) in 1996.

In his report he gives a detailed overview of the connectivity status in Africa. At the beginning of 2002, of the approximately 770 million people in Africa, on average only one in:
- 5 have a Radio (160 million people)
- 13 have a TV (50m)
- 33 have a GSM line (23m)
- 39 have a fixed line (20m)
- 130 have a PC (5.9m)
- 150 use the Internet (5.5m)
- 400 have pay-TV (2m)


The divide between the urban areas and the rural areas is even greater. Most of the users are concentrated in the towns, while the majority of Africans are scattered in small communities spread-out across the vast rural areas. Often over 75% of the country's telephone lines are concentrated in the capital city with very little perfusion of the telecommunication networks into rural areas, this as well as irregular or non-existent electricity supplies are a common feature and a major barrier to use of ICTs, especially outside the major towns. Furthermore, most tax regimes still treat computers and cell phones as luxury items, which makes these almost exclusively imported commodities all the more expensive, and even less obtainable by the majority.

However these rather discouraging statistics do not paint the entire picture. The ICT landscape has begun to change dramatically over the last few years and the huge diversity of the continent means the averages given above obscure many pockets of significant developments. Only five years ago a handful of countries had local Internet access, now it is available in every capital city. In the same period, 23 million mobile cell phones were deployed on the continent – more than the number of fixed lines laid in the last century. Hundreds of new local and community radio stations have been licensed, and satellite TV is now also widely available.

The convergence of ICTs to what is today being called the Internet has also begun to receive significant attention in Africa. Ensuring that broader sections of the population have access to the Internet is now being seen as an important development priority by governments and the international development assistance community, as typified by NEPAD, the G8 Dot.Force and the UN ICT Task Force. This status report looks in more detail at the progress of development of the Internet in Africa.

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1 comment(s)
Re: UNPLUGGED: Wiring Africa (pETER / 2002/5/9 6:52:11 PM)