Community- Based Information Technology Access: The Case of Cybercafe Diffusion in Sub-Saharan Africa

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) use and access in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to increase significantly and has proven to be the major catalyst for users to access and share information and knowledge resources globally. However, most users’ personal access to ICTs, such as the internet from home and work place, is hugely constrained due to lack of adequate infrastructure and affordability. With per capita incomes averaging less than $500 in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, families can hardly afford personal computers at home nor internet access charges. Although there is an increase in the number of PC’s at work places and homes in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, most are not networked and hardly have internet access. Public and private educational institutions such as high schools, community colleges, universities, professional schools, and public libraries offer none or limited Internet access to their students, staff and faculty, while Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s) have limited or no access to Internet due to high access costs coupled with inadequate ICT Infrastructures. Thus, most SME’s hardly engage in any form of e-commerce. The licensing of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) in some Sub-Saharan African countries only started in recent years as governments started liberalizing their telecommunications regimes. These ISP’s, local entrepreneurs, and in some cases the incumbent telecommunications company responded to these constraints by building Internet community access centers called Cybercafés. This paper is an exploratory study of the diffusion of Cybercafés within the Sub-Saharan African region by analyzing country case studies. Our findings suggest that these Cybercafés were more affordable and reduced the constraints faced by users in terms of infrastructure, access to PC’s and related ICT’s. This increased the number of users from different socio-economic backgrounds accessing and using the Internet for social, political, educational, and economic reasons. We also found a gradual and steady increase in the number of Cybercafés, the quality of service and increased affordability. Introduction and Background The Internet has become an important medium for social, political, educational, and economic activities as well as extending knowledge resources and repositories, and enhancing access to information and knowledge sharing in and from Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa, home to 32 of the 48 least developed countries in the world, has a population of nearly 659 million people, and spans over twenty-four million square kilometers. Sub-Saharan Africa has historically been associated with inadequate telecommunications infrastructure and low penetration of personal computers per capita [13]. Access to and sharing of information and knowledge resources is quite limited, and often communication cost is quite high due to the inadequacy of telecommunications infrastructure and lack of competitive environment in the ICT sector. This lack of competitive environment in the telecommunications sector hinders the rapid diffusion of basic resources, such as telephone and wireless infrastructure, needed to establish Internet presence. Previous research has associated the level of a country’s basic telecommunications infrastructure with its teledensity [13], defined as the number of land telephone lines per 100 people. SubSaharan Africa significantly lags behind other regions of the world in terms of teledensity. While there are only about two main telephone lines per 100 persons in all of Africa, there is less than one telephone line per 100 persons for most Sub-Saharan African countries (Figure 1). These figures are substantially lower than the 7 per 100 in Asia, 10 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 37 in Europe, and 66 in the United States. With such low teledensity figures, the prospects of catching up with more developed countries in Internet use look grim.