The wide availability and accessibility of ICTs has the potential to reduce poverty in Africa through extensional services in health, education, agriculture and social systems especially in rural and disadvantaged areas and groups. These as postulated earlier, have the capability of
18E-Trade involves two parties, a seller and a buyer going through a trading process of products/services.
Information searching, negotiating, contracts signing, payments transaction and delivery of products/services through an electronic media or through a combination of physical and electronic means are processes in e-trade.
19 Web Portal - Commonly referred to as simply a portal, a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services , such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.
(http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/Web_portal.html).
enhancing intra and inter country trade, efficiency as well as reducing transactional costs, attracting private investments and foreign direct investment (FDI) into the continent.
However, connectivity and interconnectivity are the main impediments to the diffusion of ICTs. Despite having a number of initiatives to enhance connectivity, Africa is still least served by telecommunications and information technology services. Figure 3.2 shows the various existing telecommunication infrastructure connectivity as well as the proposed, planned and the required submarine cable network. These are envisaged to contribute significantly to infrastructure development hence trade and economic growth in the continent.
Figure 3.1: Broadband Network in Africa
Source; NEPAD e-Africa Commission
Infrastructure to support rapid development of ICTs in Africa is very limited and rudimentary, hence affecting trade and economic growth on the continent (See Figures 3.2 and 3.3 below). The figure indicates that South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are the two least developed regions in terms of ICT infrastructure.
It has been argued that this low development in ICT infrastructure in Africa is due to high costs, a shortage of investment capital, low capacity of regulatory authorities, poor institutional linkages, lack of government commitment and the state of war and civil strife especially in the Central, Eastern and West African countries (ITU, 2003). These are also exacerbated by weak telecommunications infrastructure to support rapid development of ICT, restrictive institutional structures which are ill adapted to facilitate these developments to meet the huge demand for ICT services, weak and non-existent regional links to help create economies of scale and drive cost of capital equipment down. This is compounded by the lack of other related infrastructures such as electricity which is very unreliable and mostly concentrated in urban areas and the lack of human resource capacity in key areas to support the roll out, design and exploitation of ICTs.20
20 See ITU,(2003) and NEPAD-Infrastructure development short term action plan on http:// event -africa-networking.web.cern. ch
Figure 3.2: Regional Infrastructure Distribution 2005
Source: World Development Indicators
However, despite this low development in ICT infrastructure from a global comparative basis, the Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) region shows signs of growth especially in the mobile and Internet services indicators with a decreasing trend in the use of fixed telephony as shown in Figure 3.3 below. The Figure reveals that Africa stands a better chance of advancing in e-trade activities by utilizing mobile technology as well as the Internet while at the same time increasing investments in the adoption of the broadband technology, which is the lowest utilized technology in SSA.
Within the African continent, it has been observed that North Africa is the most advanced sub-region in telecommunications and ICT infrastructure development. It is well connected with submarine cables in the Mediterranean and other components of the Madarabtel network21. Liberalisation has taken place in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt and is in the process in Algeria (ITU, 2003). The success of these countries is mostly due to the availability of oil and gas, which have brought about overall relatively enhanced socio-economic development.
North Africa is followed by the Southern African region, then Central, Western and lastly, the Eastern Africa according to ITU (2003) analysis. With reference to infrastructure indicators for the selected countries in this study, South Africa is the most developed followed by Egypt and with Ethiopia occupying pole position (Figure 3.4)
21 MAdarabtel is the network infrastructure connecting North African countries
0.00
Fixed line and mobile phone subscribers (per 100 people)
Internet users (per 100 people)
Mobile phone subscribers (per 100 people)
Figure 3.3: ICT Utilisation Trend in Sub-Saharan Africa
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Telephone Mobile Internet Broadband
Indicators
Per 100 people
2004 2005 2006
Source: World Development Indicators
To make sure other African states learn from the initiatives that led to the successful development of the ICT infrastructure in North Africa, the initiatives around ICT developments in Egypt were analysed in the following section.
Figure 3.4: ICT Infrastructure and usage in selected African countries in 2005
0.00 10.00 20.00 30.00 40.00 50.00 60.00 70.00 80.00 90.00 Ethiopia
Egypt, Arab Rep.
Ghana Kenya Senegal South Africa
Countries
Number of people
Fixed line and mobile phone subscribers (per 100 people)
Telephone mainlines (per 100 people) Mobile phone subscribers (per 100 people) Broadband subscribers (per 100 people) Internet users (per 100 people)
Source: World Development Indicators