Overview

Many sub-Saharan African governments view the Internet as a key tool for development and are developing ICT policies accordingly, though the region still lags behind the rest of the world in both number and percentage of Internet users. Sub-Saharan Africa has a history of media abuses and restrictions on freedom of the press, and the region would seem a likely setting for equally restrictive Internet policies. However, ONI testing found evidence of a technical filtering regime in only one country, Ethiopia. As the Internet continues to develop in sub-Saharan Africa, so too will laws regulating its use. To what extent these laws will encourage education, commerce and online governance or restrict free expression largely remains to be seen.

Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa

Internet access is more scarce in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world. African Internet users account for less than 5 percent of the world’s online population, and many countries’ Internet penetration rates are less than 1 percent. This is likely to change in the near future, particularly with the growth of the mobile Internet and the rapid increase of mobile phone use in the region. According to 2008 data from the International Telecommunications Union, only five sub-Saharan African countries had penetration rates exceeding 10 percent, four of which were small island nations. At 37.8 percent, the Seychelles have the highest penetration rate in all of sub-Saharan Africa; Sierra Leone has the lowest, at 0.2 percent. Nigeria, with 11 million Internet users, has the largest online population. Of the sub-Saharan African countries discussed in this profile, Zimbabwe (the one non-island nation to break the 10 percent threshold) has the highest penetration rate at 10.5 percent, followed by Uganda (7.8 percent) and Nigeria (7.26 percent). Ethiopia lags behind at 0.4 percent, the second-lowest rate on the continent.

Poor infrastructure is the major factor in the region’s low ICT adoption rates. Only 17 percent of sub-Saharan Africans have electricity access; in rural areas this drops to 5 percent. Areas that are connected to power grids often suffer outages, and power shortages have forced many countries to operate under loadshedding agreements, or rolling blackouts, in which residents receive electricity on a schedule that ranges from every other day to once a week or less. Many ISPs still obtain bandwidth from foreign service providers via satellite, which can be up to five times as expensive as bandwidth delivered via undersea cable. Though West and Southern Africa have connected to India via the South African Telecom-3 (SAT-3) submarine fiber optic cable for some time, until the arrival of Seacon in July 2009, Eastern Africa was excluded from the international cable system. Plans for the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) have been repeatedly delayed.

In 2006, massive inflation in Zimbabwe caused government-owned ISP TelOne to amass a USD700,000 debt to international satellite communications provider Intelsat. Intelsat cut service to the country for several weeks, causing severe delays for Internet users. Service was restored after the country’s reserve bank paid TelOne’s outstanding debt, but the incidence highlights the strain many sub-Saharan African ISPs face in obtaining adequate bandwidth for their customers.

In the 1990s many sub-Saharan African countries began to privatize their telecommunications industries in an attempt to boost the private sector and thereby attract greater foreign investment. Privatization has met with mixed success: in Niger, government plans to sell the national mobile phone network in multiple sections prompted a two-month strike by telecoms workers, who feared the industry would suffer from segmentation. In Uganda, where the telecoms market was opened to competitors in 1997, concerns about corruption in the privatization minister’s office led the country’s parliament to suspend all privatization operations during 1998. The sale of public telecoms companies in both Ghana and Zambia is being challenged in court at the time of writing; in both cases the national governments allegedly failed to follow proper privatization protocols. Still, privatization has helped many countries with flagging telecoms companies revitalize their telecoms industries, and in many cases privatization has marked the first step toward major ICT expansion

Many sub-Saharan African governments, recognizing the potential of ICT to encourage development, have made serious efforts to expand Internet access in their countries. In April 2009, the government of Zimbabwe announced a plan to establish Internet cafés at post offices in rural areas. Rwanda's 2006-2010 ICT plan, which covers education, governance, infrastructure, legislation and human capacity development, is aimed at helping the country "'eapfrog' into the digital-era global economy." Uganda's 2009/2010 government budget includes support for expanding current ICT infrastructure, linking most of the country’s major towns through 1500 km of optical fiber and providing for connectivity to ease the transition to the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), scheduled to be completed in June 2010.

Ethiopia has also made attempts to increase available broadband by laying fiber optic cable along the country's major highways, by making overtures to EASSy and by connecting Addis Ababa to existing fiber optic networks in Port Sudan and Djibouti. Nigeria is perhaps the most well established country in terms of ICT infrastructure – the country has its own communications satellite and is connected to India through the SAT-3 cable – and its National Information Technology Development Agency focuses on expanding Internet access to rural areas, supporting electronic governance, and increasing personal computer ownership.

Though most governments agree that greater use of ICT is beneficial for their citizens, sub-Saharan African countries vary vastly in the scope and availability of Internet services. Nigeria currently has more than 100 licensed ISPs, while Ethiopia continues to maintain strict control over its single, government-owned telecoms company. Many countries limit the provision of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services to state-owned companies; others restrict its use entirely. As of 2007 only 20 countries had opened VOIP to private companies. The adoption of WiMAX, which expands the reach of wireless access to 30 miles (compared with 300 feet for traditional WiFi) and is less expensive than DSL, has been a boon for rural access in the region; in 2007 the United Nations announced a plan to utilize WiMAX to increase connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa, and multiple companies have initiated WiMAX operations throughout the continent. In-home Internet access is still prohibitively expensive for most sub-Saharan African citizens; prices in Uganda can be as high as USD350 per month, or nearly one-third the GDP per capita. As a result, most sub-Saharan African Internet users get online at public Internet cafés, where access is generally slow and unreliable. Despite this obstacle, vibrant online communities exist in many countries: South Africa’s bloggers number in the thousands, and the number of Facebook users in Nigeria increased almost six-fold between July 2008 and July 2009.