Internet revolution on hold in Africa until further notice

‘STATISTICS confirm ICT revolution of the past 15 years”, ran the headline of an announcement from the International Telecommunications Union this week.

The triumphant declaration came as the ITU released its latest annual statistics for the main geographic regions of the world, showing 3.2 billion people using the internet globally, with two billion of those in the developing world.

Between 2000 and 2015, said the ITU, internet penetration had increased almost sevenfold, from 6.5% to 43% of the global population.

The proportion of households with internet access at home, it said, had advanced from 18% in 2005 to 46% in 2015.

In Africa, the revolution looked a little less rosy. Household penetration had reached only 11%, and individual penetration 19% — less than half that of the rest of the world.

There are two ways you can look at the data. One is through the rose-tinted glasses of the revolution suggested by the ITU, which obliges us to look back to 2000. And, yes, it looks like a new world order: a mere 0.4% of the population of Africa was online back then. From near-zero to 19% — one in five Africans getting connected — in 15 years cannot be dismissed as “same old”.

But a different picture emerges when we look at only the most recent growth.

ITU data for 2013 showed 16.8% penetration in Africa, compared with global penetration of 37.9%.

In other words, from 2013 to 2014, Africa grew by only 2.2% — compared to global growth of 2.5% — itself a few Cubas short of a revolution.

The major obstacles to connectivity in Africa are affordability, quality of connectivity, and access to connected devices. The last will disappear as smartphones become pervasive — South Africa will reach 50% smartphone penetration next year — but quality can only be addressed by massive investment in infrastructure, and affordability remains a challenge where poverty is more the norm than exception.

The ITU data unintentionally lays bare the structure of the revolution. It can be discerned in the gap between individual penetration and household penetration. To put this in context, most of the rosiest assessments of South African internet access were based on the 2012 Census, which showed 35% of households having an internet connection. This was quickly confused with population penetration by many commentators and analysts, who suggested that more than 18 mil- lion South Africans were online back in 2012.

However, with only 14 million households in South Africa, it is feasible that a paltry five million people could account for that 35% penetration.

The reality is fortunately more positive than that, but was still nowhere near 18 million users three years ago. It is a threshold likely to be crossed only by the end of this year.

Across Africa, according to the ITU, only 11.1% of house- holds have internet access, compared with 19% of individuals. A little arithmetic tells us that if one in 10 households have access, but two in 10 individuals, then only a small proportion of households have all the access, with multiple users in each. The rest are typically frozen out of the internet, with their access to digital goods as limited as to all other kinds.

Clearly, while we may have been there when it started, the revolution is passing us by.

Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editorin-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee and on YouTube