We are here to look at telecommunications access in Africa and its role in facilitating intellectual content. It is instructive to look first at the United States. The U.S. Department of Commerce researched disparities in Internet access. As it is in the USA, so it is in for the world. Africa a continent that is poor, that is black and substantially rural is largely unable to participate in the great digital repository of human knowledge.
Internet access is the newest variation on the story of scarce communications in Africa.
Most Africans are among the nearly 2.5 billion people worldwide that have never made a phone call. Manhattan has more phones than sub-Saharan Africa. The digital divide threatens the future of Africa . . . Because, the digital divide carries real consequences for the ability of a society to keep itself healthy, productive and stable. In a world where civil aviation moves people and microbes, disease in Africa is impossible to confine to Africa.