eTransform Africa Urges Rebuild of Continent with ICT

eTransform Africa,  a new flagship report   produced by the World Bank and the African Development Bank, with the support of the African Union has identified best practice in the use of ICTs in key sectors of the African economy.

Under the theme "Transformation-Ready", the growing contribution of ICTs to Agriculture, Climate Change Adaptation, Education, Financial Services, Government Services and Health is explored.

In addition, the report highlights the role of ICTs in enhancing African regional trade and integration as well as the need to build a competitive ICT industry to boost innovation, job creation and the export potential of African companies.

According to the report, Africa is still at the beginning of its growth curve and, to date, most ICT applications have been pilot programmes.

The eTransform Africa study grew out of the African Union Summit of ICT Ministers, held in Addis Ababa in January 2010.

At that meeting, ministers expressed their belief in the transformational power of ICTs and their view that Africa was poised for a new era of growth that would take advantage of the platform laid by investment in new networks over the previous decade.

In the 2000s, the focus had been on connectivity, bringing more and more of Africa’s citizens into the information society and building ever-faster connections to the rest of the world.

Analytical research had indicated the boost to economic and social development that could come from network investment.

Over the previous 25 years, a 10 per cent increase in the penetration rate of mobile phones had been associated with a 0.8 per cent boost in GDP per capita in developing countries, while the same increase in broadband networks could add a further 1.4 per cent to general economic growth (World Bank, 2009). In the 2010s, the focus should logically shift to transformation as the penetration of ICTs deepens in the core sectors of the African economy (World Bank, 2012).

While Ministers were hopeful of transformational change, they also expressed their frustration at the lack of hard evidence of the links between investment in ICTs and sectoral development. There were plenty of pilot programmes but few of these had reached scale or shown wide-reaching impact.

There was a need to prioritize investment in using ICTs for sectoral development, but which sectors should be first in the queue? Which business models were proving successful and which pilot programmes represented best practice that could be replicated and scaled up? from the private sector in telecom