Dear Colleagues, Many of you may be interested in this report from the World Bank about the state of connectivity in LDCs.
************************************************ Connecting Developing Countries BBC March 9, 2006 Five years ago in Nigeria, there were 370,000 people with mobile phones. Just four years later, mobile phone users in the country topped 16.8 million. It's a result that has made the Nigerian mobile phone market the second largest in Africa. And in the Philippines, there are now more mobile phone subscribers than fixed telephone subscribers. By the end of last year, the Philippines had about 40 million mobile phone subscribers - six times more than in 2000. These two countries are among the 144 economies named in a new World Bank report, "Information and Communications for Development 2006: Global Trends and Policies", which examines progress worldwide in rolling out access to Information and Communication Technologies (known as ICT). According to Mohsen Khalil, Director of the World Bank Group's Global ICT Department, the report shows the mobile telephone revolution has been a key driver behind increased access to ICT in developing countries. Mobile Phone Growth "Developing countries have witnessed a remarkable progress in terms of connectivity over the past 10 years", Khalil says. "In 1990, developing countries had only 20 percent of the total telephone lines in the world. Today they have 60 percent. And more interesting is that the growth is still in the developing countries and this is mostly due to the mobile telephony revolution." There are now more mobile than fixed phones and about 70 percent of the developing world's population - over 50 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa - live within footprint of mobile phone services The report also makes the point that with prepaid services and calling cards, even poor households benefit from increased telephone access. By 2005, half the world's households had telephones. Among developing regions, the telephone subscription rate is highest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia - where it more than doubled from 2000 to 2004. But growth was highest in Sub-Saharan Africa - with the telephone subscription rate tripling - albeit to a still low 103 subscribers per 1000 people. Mixed Picture for the Internet Bank economist and editor of the report, Christine Qiang, says while the developing world has seen huge progress in the rollout of basic infrastructure for communications technology, the picture is more mixed for advanced uses such as the internet. Worldwide internet use quadrupled between 2000 and 2005. But as Qiang points out: "while developed nations have more than 300 secure internet servers per one million people, developing nations have fewer than two. Canada has more secure servers than all the developing countries combined." Eastern Europe and Central Asia are in the lead among developing regions, with 117 internet users per 1000 people. That's six to eight times as many as in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The report also says developing countries still have far to go to make access to ICT commonplace in governments, schools and businesses. For example, while most developed nations have connected nearly all of their primary and secondary schools to the internet, only 38 percent of developing countries have done so. For Africa, the figure is less than one percent. The Way Ahead The report urges developing countries to work in partnership with the private sector to extend the reach and use of ICT. And there is also a need to break down existing monopolies in developing countries. "The existence of monopolies still in about half of the developing countries, particularly over long distance and international communications - which have determined the course of internet service - is the main obstacle today for the dissemination of information services," Khalil says. "The developing countries have to complete their liberalization process by bringing an end to the remaining monopolies and fully liberalizing the provision of services by encouraging the private sector to provide services at an affordable cost," he says. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
