Internet in Africa

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people who were not connected to the internet lost access to health care and education. Production in all industries was seriously harmed.

While the telecommunications market in Africa is still in its early stages of development, it is also one of the fastest-growing in the world. In the 2000s, mobile telephone service in Africa has been rising, and mobile telephone use is now substantially more widespread than fixed-line telephony. Telecommunication companies in Africa are looking at Broadband Wireless Access technologies as the key to make Internet available to the population at large. Projects are being completed that aim at the realization of Internet backbones that might help cut the cost of bandwidth in African countries.

The International Telecommunication Union held the first Connect the World meeting in Kigali, Rwanda (in October 2007) as a demonstration that the development of telecommunications in Africa is considered a key intermediate objective for the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals.

Internet penetration in Africa, by country

Previous situation

The information available about the ability of people in Africa to use the internet (for instance ISP subscriptions, host number, network traffic, available bandwidth and bandwidth cost) give an essentially homogeneous picture. South Africa is the only African country that has figures similar to those of Europe and North America: it is followed by some smaller, tourist-dependent economies, such as Seychelles and Mauritius, and a few North African countries, notably Morocco and Egypt. The leading Subsaharan countries in telecommunication sand internet development are South Africa and Kenya.

Current trend

As of December 2020, Kenya had an internet penetration of approximately 85.2. This high rate is mainly because Kenya is home to M-Pesa, which is a mobile wallet provider and the offered secure payment system encourages internet access. As of October 2020, the majority of web traffic in leading digital markets in Africa originated from mobile devices in Nigeria, one of the countries with the biggest number of internet users worldwide. Across the nation, 74 percent of web traffic was generated via smartphones and only 24 percent via PC devices. This is connected to the fact that mobile connections are much cheaper and do not require the infrastructure that is needed for traditional desktop PCs with fixed-line internet connections.

Context

Obstacles to the accessibility of Internet services in Africa include generally low levels of computer literacy in the population, poor infrastructures, and high costs of Internet services. Power availability is also scarce, with vast rural areas that are not connected to power grids as well as frequent black-outs in major urban areas such as Dar es Salaam.

In 2000, Subsaharan Africa as a whole had fewer fixed telephone lines than Manhattan, and in 2006, Africa contributed to only 2% of the world's overall telephone lines in the world. As a consequence of this general lack of connectivity, most Africa-generated network traffic (something between 70% and 85%) is routed through servers that are located elsewhere (mainly Europe).

Overall bandwidth in Africa is scarce, and its irregular distribution clearly reflects the African "inner digital divide". In 2007, 16 countries in Africa had just one international Internet connection with a capacity of 10 Mbit/s or lower, while South Africa alone had over 800 Mbit/s. The main backbones connecting Africa to the rest of the world via submarine cables, i.e., SAT-2 and SAT-3, provide for a limited bandwidth. In 2007, all these international connections from Africa amounted to roughly 28,000 Mbit/s, while Asia had 800,000 Mbit/s and Europe had over 3,000,000 Mbit/s. The total bandwidth available to Africa was less than that available to Norway alone (49,000 Mbit/s).

As a consequence of the scarce overall bandwidth provided by cable connections, a large section of Internet traffic in Africa goes through expensive satellite links. In general, thus, the cost of Internet access (and even more so broadband access) is unaffordable for most of the population. According to the Kenyan ISPs association, high costs are also a consequence of the subjection of African ISPs to European ISPs and the lack of a clear international regulation of inter-ISP cost partition. For example, while ITU has long ratified that the cost of inter-provider telephonic connections must be charged to all involved providers in equal parts, in 2002, the Kenyan ISP association has denounced that all costs of Internet traffic between Europe and Africa are charged to African providers.

Internet access

According to 2011 estimates, about 13.5% of the African population has Internet access. While Africa accounts for 15.0% of the world's population, only 6.2% of the World's Internet subscribers are Africans. Africans who have access to broadband connections are estimated to be in percentage of 1% or lower. In September 2007, African broadband subscribers were 1,097,200, with a major part of these subscriptions from large companies or institutions.

Internet access is also irregularly distributed, with 2/3 of overall online activity in Africa being generated in South Africa (which only accounts for 5% of the continent's population). Most of the remaining 1/3 is in Morocco and Egypt. The largest percentage of Internet subscribers are found in small economies such as Seychelles, where as much as 37% of the population has Internet access (while in South Africa this value is 11% and in Egypt it is 8%).

It has been noted, anyway, that data on Internet subscribers only partially reflect the actual number of Internet users in Africa, and the impact of the network on African daily life and culture. For example, cybercafes and Internet kiosks are common in the urban areas of many African countries. There are also other informal means to "access" the Internet; for example, couriers that print e-mail messages and deliver them by hand to recipients in remote locations, or radio stations that broadcast information taken from the Internet.

Number of hosts

The picture provided by the figures for the number of network hosts is coherent with those above. At the end of 2007:

• about 1.8 million hosts were in Africa, versus over 120 million in Europe, 67 million in Asia and 27 million in South America;
• Africa as a whole had fewer hosts than Finland alone;
• relatively developed Nigeria, despite its 155 million inhabitants, had one third of the hosts found in Liechtenstein with its 35,000 inhabitants; and
• the largest number of African hosts (almost 90%) were in just three countries, South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt.

The table below lists the number of hosts for African countries with more than 1000 hosts in 2007 and 2013. These countries collectively account for 99% of Africa's overall hosts. The last column for each year provides the "host density" measured as the number of hosts per 1000 inhabitants; for comparison, consider that the average host density in the world was 43 hosts per 1000 inhabitants in 2007 and 72 hosts per 1000 inhabitants in 2013.

IXP traffic

An indirect measure that is sometimes used to assess the penetration of Internet technology in a given area is the overall amount of data traffic at Internet exchange points (IXPs). On African IXPs, traffic can be measured in kbit/s (kilobits per second) or Mbit/s (megabits per second), while in the rest of the world it is typically in the order of magnitude of Gbit/s (gigabits per second). The main IXP of Johannesburg, JINX (which is also the largest IXP in Africa) has about 6.5 Gbit/s traffic (in Sep 2012).

IXP traffic, anyway, is only a measure of local network traffic (mainly e-mail), while most of African generated traffic is routed through other continents, and most Web content created in Africa is hosted on Web servers located elsewhere. Additionally, measurable data do not consider private peering, i.e., inter-ISP traffic that does not go through IXPs. For example, the main academic network in South Africa, TENET, has 10 Gbit/s private peering with ISP Internet Solutions both in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Regulation

The privatization of the telecommunication market, as well as the regulation of the competition in this market, are in an early stage of development in many Africa countries. Kenya and Botswana have started a privatization process for Telkom Kenya and Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC), respectively. The mobile telephony market is generally more open and dynamic, and even more so is the Internet market.

The table below depicts the percentage of African countries where telecommunications markets (fixed line telephony, mobile telephony, Internet) are monopolistic, partially competitive, or fully competitive, either de iure or de facto (data refer to 2007).

The regulation of network businesses and the establishment of authorities to control them is widely recognised as a relevant objective by most African governments. A model for such regulation is provided by Morocco; after an authority was established in 1998, and Meditel entered the market in 1999 to compete with the main incumbent Maroc Telecom, the situation has been quickly developing. Based on such experiences and on the directions provided by ITU, most African countries now have local Internet authorities and are defining local regulation of the Internet market. In 2007, 83% of African countries had their own authority for Internet services and data traffic.