W.Africa: Nigeria ranks third on Internet penetration

A survey conducted among West African countries has ranked Nigeria third in Internet penetration in the sub-region.

This is coming as the result indicated that gender distribution on Internet access has a large margin between the male and female folks.

While the male recorded 86 per cent, the female scored 14 per cent during the survey.

The study conducted by Canadian-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and led by Messrs Ben Akoh, Bjørnar Egede-Nissen, Don MacLean and Heather Creech, was entitled “Preparing the Ground for the West Africa Internet Governance Forum: A review of Internet public policy interests and processes in selected countries in the region.”

According to the Project Manager, Global Connectivity, Mr. Ben Akoh said that out of the 300 respondents that participated in the survey, Nigeria ranked third with 38 numbers of valid entries, coming behind Togo and Burkina Faso which had 105 and 56 respondents respectively.

He also said that Ghana’s valid entries were 25; Liberia 16, Senegal 1 while Sierra Leone got 14 valid entries.

Akoh decried the consequence of the survey, noting that though Internet penetration has been on the rise in the above listed countries, the growth rate is variable across these countries.

He cited an instance with the number of entries from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, and Togo, saying they have better Internet penetration and thus present a better representative sample for the region, but their survey response rate showed a contradiction to this trend.

Senegal, he pointed out, has a low response rate because of the inability to reach a national coordinator responsible for widely disseminating, just as the response rates for the Gambia, Sierra Leone and Liberia were low, an indicative of the challenge of Internet access in these countries.

However, these present an opportunity for future surveys and research that is targeted at a much wider West African population which comprises of the fifteen ECOWAS member states.

The team’s disposition of the respondents margin showed that the male gender scored about 86 and female 14 per cent respectively, which shows the gender bias may have on internet access across the ECOWAs countries.

The gender bias, the study showed may have had a significant effect on, among other things, issue priorities and what stakeholders were considered legitimate participants in the Internet governance process.

The study, further showed that the age distribution was between the age group of 18 and 34, which constitutes 54.6 per cent. Even as the next bracket of 35 to 49 has 35.2 per cent of respondents and 9.6 per cent were in the bracket of 50 to 64.

“Only one respondent was over 65 years of age. This, however, is somewhat commensurate with the age distribution in the surveyed countries, where populations are young and life expectancy is much shorter than in the global North,” part of the study stated.

Remmy Nweke:
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