Poor internet blocks African innovative genius

For example, according to the WEF global rankings, South African internet use and impact is not improving because of weak government policy, which in turns perpetuates the country’s poor skills base (globally South Africa comes in at 97th place in terms of skills provision).

Kenya is fractionally worse, at 98th place in terms of skills. But most remarkable of all is the very poor performance of Nigeria: the country’s global scores in terms of infrastructure (117th place) and network affordability (107th place) are both far below average, but Nigeria’s skills performance is most striking of all. At 132nd place out of 148 countries, Nigeria is one of the worst places in the world to find ICT skills.

For many, these figures may come as a surprise: as anyone who has visited Lagos or Nairobi recently will be aware, urban Africans are extremely enthusiastic users of mobile technology, including mobile broadband.

For many this means ever-growing use of social media networks, whether they be global, national or even city-based networks, typically run on SMS-type message systems that can function on the simplest of mobile phones without the need for fast internet data connections.

But increasingly, the urban elite is using more sophisticated social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which are often internet browser-based and require faster and more expensive data connections.

Recently the consultancy Portland Communications released its latest research on the use of the micro-blogging service Twitter in African cities. In How Africa Tweets, the consultanc reported on Twitter use in African cities over a three-month period at the end of 2013 – and found some very interesting results.

The Portland research included only ‘geo-located’ tweets – that is, tweets where the location of the user could be identified – and only urban tweets. Unsurprisingly, South African cities are the biggest source of Twitter postings in all of Africa, and Johannesburg is the most active city on the continent, with just over 344,000 tweets in the three-month period.

What is surprising is that Kenya continues to dominate Twitter activity in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Nairobi is the next biggest source of urban tweets after the South African cities, with over 123,000 tweets in the last quarter of 2013. Nairobi is far more active than Lagos – and when adjusted for population the difference is even more striking, given that Lagos has more than five times the 3m population of Nairobi.

Also striking is the fact that Accra is the most active Twitter city in West Africa – and that activity seems to be growing very rapidly. When Portland Communications ran its first African Twitter survey two years ago, focusing on national rather than urban Twitter usage, it found only 2,150 tweets originating from the whole of Ghana over a three-month period.

This year it found over 78,000 from Accra alone, suggesting that Ghana is emerging as the economy with the most dynamic internet sector in West Africa.

Rwanda and Seychelles in the lead
These results on Twitter usage need to be accompanied by some caveats. Lack of tweets does not equal lack of internet engagement. For example, according to the Lagos technology consultancy NaijaTechGuide, Twitter applications do not even make it into the top seven social media apps in Nigeria, and only BlackBerry users rate Twitter as a leading social media service.

Nigerian users are much more likely to use the local 2go messaging and chat service, or Facebook, or WhatsApp.

Nevertheless, because Twitter is often accessed by mobile broadband users (as broadband allows full use of Twitter functions like video sharing) rather than users of simple mobile phones, Twitter usage is effectively a marker of more advanced internet use.

The Portland results are also likely to be of considerable interest to companies looking for premium customers in Africa: Portland reports than in Africa there is relatively low use of Twitter hashtags for political issues, but increasing use of brand name hashtags (with Magnum ice cream leading the pack). But politics is not entirely absent: the biggest recorded spike in Twitter use in Africa was on the death of Nelson Mandela.

Despite the disappointing rate of take-up of internet services in Africa, it still remains true that sub-Saharan Africa will be one of the great online markets of the future.

But what is also clear is that the leading online economies may not be the ones that digital pioneers first expected. According to the WEF, the sub-Saharan African country experiencing the biggest social impact from internet use is Rwanda. And the country recording the highest level of individual usage is Seychelles. In the digital age, Africa’s biggest economies are getting left behind.