Africa faces digitalisation hurdles
‘We need to ensure that this… revolution is supported.’
AFRICA’S poor infrastructure was threatening to black out its ambitious digital revolution, experts said at the regional International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference in Kigali.
Information technology experts observed that poor transport, communication and energy infrastructures posed a serious threat to the digital revolution.
Rwanda hosted the forum from Tuesday till yesterday ahead of the World Telecommunication Development Conference 2017 (WTDC-17) in Buenos Aires.
Speaking at the meeting yesterday, Ibrahim Sanou, the director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau, said due to poor infrastructure, Africa’s share of global technological revolution was drastically disproportionate to its population.
“Africa should not wait until the train of the next industrial revolution has passed,” Sanou said. “Digital transformation of African economies is lucrative.”
In the last five years, Africa has undergone a phenomenon that analysts refer to as the continent’s “digital revolution”.
However, inadequate or poor infrastructure development has derailed the growth of technology advancements.
The meeting attracted information and communication technology (ICT) policymakers, regulators, industry, academia, regional and international development agencies and organisations from Africa and beyond to discuss specific regional telecommunication and ICT issues.
According to the World Bank, only 40percent of Africans had reliable energy supply, and just 20percent of people on the continent had Internet access.
Jean Philbert Nsengimana, the Rwandan Minister of Youth and ICT, said addressing infrastructure challenges meant advancing digital revolution.
“We are at the dawn of a technological revolution that will change almost every part of our lives. We need to ensure that this wave of digital revolution is supported by investments in infrastructural growth to enable smooth transition from analogue to digital technologies,” he noted.
Analysts said the construction of undersea fiber-optic cables, coupled with a full embrace of mobile technology, was yet to redefine Africa’s ICT landscape.
Power was Africa’s biggest infrastructure weak point, with up to 30 countries facing regular power outages, according to a 2015 report by the World Bank.