Teledensity Technological Growth Strategy for Africa's LDC's: 'Viagra' Development Strategy or Sustainable Development Strategy? - The African Telecommunications Stakeholders Speak

Over-dependence of African countries on the West has been reflected in various socioeconomic dimensions. Such dependence has also been reflected in the telecommunications industry of Africa’s LDCs in a bid to solve its low teledensity (number of main telephone lines per one hundred inhabitants) problems. African LDCs are greatly behind other regions of the world in utilizing information and telecommunications technologies, which in turn, has repercussions such as the great digital divide that leaves African LDCs far behind other regions of the world. Various technological-oriented obstacles account for the low levels of teledensity in these countries. This therefore calls for a debate on what strategies can be adopted to solve this problem: use the ‘viagra’ approach by totally depending on the West to come in for a short term, vigorously solve the problem, and leave thereafter an infrastructure with nobody to manage it, or use a self-sufficiency approach and an African Foreign Alliance approach to solve the technological-oriented obstacles. Therefore use of the term ‘viagra’ in this context is to imply a quick and easy solution. Using Friedman’s Test, factor analysis, and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) statistical procedures, this study examines the perceptions of Africa’s telecommunications stakeholders on strategies to solve the technology-oriented obstacles. The findings suggest that Africa’s LDCs should adopt a self-sufficiency approach and create alliances with foreign countries in order to realize sustainable development of their telecommunications infrastructure and hence promote growth of teledensity. HICSS 01 paper code number: CLCDV05