At the end of October an almost surreal story about Africa’s obvious lack of presence on the Internet made the rounds of the usual news agencies. What were they thinking?
Okay, here are the bottom line statistics. Although 10 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa, less than 1 percent of the world’s Internet users are Africans, and 40 percent of those live in South Africa.
Don’t worry, though, the usual suspects have a solution to this “problem.” The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are prepared to ride to the rescue and make sure Africans have Internet access. Given how unsuccessful the World Bank and IMF have been at putting the economies of developing world on a solid foundation, by the time they get finished with Internet access, Africans will be lucky to have even spotty telephone service.
The Associated Press captured the surrealist of the World Bank and IMF devoting itself to getting Africans on the Internet when it actually included this sentence in the lead paragraph of a story on the report: “…A million South Africans have access to the Web, but practically nobody does in war-racked Congo.” What a surprise! The next thing you know, we’ll learn that people in war-torn Ethiopia and Eritrea also have almost no Internet access.
The bottom line is that where civil society has taken hold in Africa, and democracy and free speech have replaced dictatorial rule and indiscriminate power, telecommunications services have taken off. Ghana is well on its way to being a wired country, for example, because it privatized its telephone services in 1994, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo is likely to remain off the Internet for the foreseeable future as its ongoing decade-long civil war will make building up a telecommunications infrastructure all but impossible.
The focus on Internet access in Africa seems to be the worst sort of case of offering Western technologies as the solution to the continent’s problems.
Sources:
Report shows African Internet use disparity. The Associated Press, October 30, 2000.