http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/Reporting/ShowReportFrame.aspx?ReportName=/WTI/InformationTechnologyPublic&RP_intYear=2008&RP_intLanguageID=1

The methodology is here, and acknowledges the inherent flakiness of the “user” statistic — subscriptions are also apparently self-reported by the industry, which is likely prone to distortions as well.

http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/Indicators/WTI_Technotes.pdf

Perhaps you should also consider that the one thing Africans and South Americans have in common in that they are both conquered peoples-that naturally means the serve , sadly till today, their imposed “homelands”

Given that there is fairly decent geolocation available for IP addresses (the original map is from a company that does geolocation, in fact) what you want to do is measure something that is correlated to individual usage which originates from an African IP address. Even if measured from a US- or EU-centric perspective, it would tend to show use of the Internet for external-facing uses.

@Mike:

You can lead a horse to water, etc. If you read the Wired article I referenced above you’ll get a feel for the time lines that these things are planned on, and I suspect that at some point someone thought things were going to get better eventually. My guess is that the drop will be potential rather than actual until it makes some sort of sense.

@Iyinoluwa Aboyeji:

This leads to your point — if one looks at the submarine cable map of the U.S., one reason there can be such massive concentrations of cable landings in a few spots is that there is a tremendous amount of diverse and reliable internal bandwidth. No such luck in Africa (or S. America, for that matter). Just worked on a deal that dependent on a lot of intra S. America bandwidth and for a number of countries it was easier to run it through the U.S rather than from country to country. (This is only partly an infrastructure problem — it’s also a regulatory one, see below.)

@joe:

Governance indeed, and the willingness of countries to open the telecoms market to competition. My anecdotal experience in the the Caribbean taught me that bandwidth-dependent IT development wasn’t just a factor of landing the cable, but geting past the local C&W monopoly. Presumably there are similar problems in Africa.

Excellent maps! Thanks.

Your comment reminds me of that famous Robert Solow quote:

“Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.”

SS

The lack of infrastructure can explain the fact that none (except french and belgian multinational) want to invest in Africa.

Look a country like Cameroon or DRC; nothing have been done in those two countries to improve roads and other infrastructures facilities for decades.

How do you want to attract investors in your country if you are not able to provide electricity without ten interruption in a day? How could you attract tourist if there is only one flight a week to go to your country?

There is so many absurdities and nonsense in the way Africans leaders think.

One of the solutions to improve the situation would be:

1. oblige multinationals operating in Africa to publish the royalties that they pay to the African government and oblige especially the french multinational to pay the real price of what they extract.

the second one ; Promote regional economic bodies like ECOWA, EAC, SADC etc…. Only them could be enough powerful, if the African leader want, to conduct economic, financial reforms