Africa and the Information Economy. Most discussion list participants attempted to respond to Catherine Nyaki Adera' s challenging questions, so the summary below follows her guidelines. We look forward to having these questions and topics expanded on and further debated in the coming week. Because of dynamic developments in ICTs, this week's discussion leader pointed out that the perceptions, and consequently, the working definitions, of the information economy are constantly changing.
African countries do have their own information economy already.
In order to move forward in terms of generation, processing and use of information, African economies must work based on the current transformation in network technologies. Implications for Africa could be potentially huge if problems of access to financial systems such as credit cards and banking were resolved. Although global use of ICTs is novel, they operate on top of the existing social and economic structure. They present the possibility to overcome a lack of material resources by investing in human, organisational and social capital. Contributing to this view, one person cited the example of the advent of the telegraph and railroads, to demonstrate how the primary effects of the introduction of new technologies is usually to strengthen the power of those organisations investing in technology.