Technology sectorHow Africa can develop a home-grown tech sector
Africa is coming online rapidly. Internet penetration in the continent is growing faster than in any other region in the world, giving millions more people access to better communication, information and business opportunities. Although only around 20 percent of people in Africa have internet access (compared to a global average of 40 percent), this has increased from less than 5 percent ten years ago.
Africa is coming online rapidly. Internet penetration in the continent is growing faster than in any other region in the world, giving millions more people access to better communication, information and business opportunities. Although only around 20 percent of people in Africa have internet access (compared to a global average of 40 percent), this has increased from less than 5 percent ten years ago.
What’s missing, however, is a significant amount of locally created, owned and hosted online services. For example, there are just 12 secure web servers for every million people in Africa, compared to 1,171 in North America. Instead of using home-grown services, many countries favor globally popular brands based in other parts of the world, such as Google and Facebook. This lack of local African online presence is putting the continent at a serious disadvantage, denying people the chance to take full advantage of the net’s potential. The difficult question is what to do about it.
You could argue that Africa’s appetite for international online brands is a good thing as it shows how the internet is seamlessly connecting emerging regions to the global market. But it comes at a cost. Flooding emerging regions with highly developed competition runs the risk of stifling new local alternatives, a problem that economists and politicians have worried about for hundreds of years.
How, for example, can a fledgling, locally created, online service compete against the likes of Google? It’s possible this obstacle could limit the economic benefits for African countries and prevents them from helping to further enrich and diversify the web away from a few big players.
In my own recent research, I found that Africa’s internet problems are not only to do with creation and ownership of websites. Even services that are locally designed in Africa (such as news websites) are often hosted and operated outside of the continent, often in the US and Europe. The main reason for this is the cheaper and more reliable hosting services available abroad. A recent report from the Internet Society found that Rwandan content providers could save $111 per year by hosting their content overseas.
Slower, more expensive
But this is a double-edged sword. It might be cheaper for the websites, but it’s much more expensive for the local internet service providers or ISPs (the companies that connect users to the internet), who have to fetch the data from across the
