by Tunde Adelakun

Created on: November 12, 2007   Last Updated: February 27, 2011

On the 31st of October, there was a 2 day-conference in Kigali,the Capital city of war ravaged Rwanda.  The Connect Africa conference,a brainchild of the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union,forsaw that from less than one percent broadband penetration on the continent today, Africa,with a 99 percent growth opportunity, will have achieved over 30 percent connectivity growth rate in the next five years.

Good projection, one would say, and a commendable way to strengthen the struggle to bridge the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the World.
Perhaps because the potentials offered by the internet is far from our contemplation, and perhaps because this wonderful gift of technology offers little or no attraction to Africa political leaders, the benefits to the generality of the people and different classes of professionals for varied reasons have eluded us.

At the twilight of the last millennium when the world was fast embracing the internet and growth rate of connectivity was astronomical in Europe,Asia,North and Latin America,statistics show that only two African countries-South Africa and Egypt were on the world map of internet connectivity,however,the web technology had clustered most national capitals and cities in Africa but with minimal level of patronage.]

The same problems of cost,accessibility,affordability,among others,identified almost a decade ago by the then president of the India-based International Institute for Information Technology, have continued to clog internet growth in developing countries.In Africa, the over-concentration of internet services in urban centres and the limited number of Internet Service Providers have combined to stunt internet growth.  These problems cannot be divorced from the cost and profitability factors which have conspired to limit connectivity rate in Africa to disgruntled 34 million users-less than 10 percent of Asia's 437 million users. ISPs have cited cost of equipments and high landing cost,resulting significantly from high custorm duties on communication technology equipment. The cost gets passed to the subscribers hence the fortunes people have to part with to remain crawlers or surfers on the World Wide Web in.

Some of the initial problems responsible for high internet service are now being succumbed in most African countries.The number of ISPs is growing and most of them boast of Points-of-presence {PoPs} in the cities.The implication of the urbanization of their presence

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