ITU: Kenya and Rwanda Has the Most Expensive Internet Services in East Africa

ITU has listed Kenya internet services as the most expensive in the region in its annual study titled “Measuring the Information Society”. Each year ITU list the ICT Development Index (IDI) and ICT Price basket (IPB) in the study. According to ITU, “IDI captures progress made in regard to ICT infrastructure, use and skills while IPB monitors the affordability of ICT services and in explaining why some  countries have moved faster than others in their ICT development”.

The report shows that there is a relation between income levels and ICT use in developed and developing economies. It further shows that even though some economies charges higher on ICT services, national penetration of internet services has continued to grow while those charging lower in some instances experience stagnant growth.

ITU recommends that future policy action needs to address issues that are related not only to access, but also to:

• price;
• bandwidth;
• speed and quality of service;
• skills;
• content and language; and
• applications targeted to low-end users.

Some key highlights in the report include:

• Fixed telephony continues to decline, as it has done since 2005, especially in developed countries, where the fixed-line market has been overtaken by mobile-cellular telephony .
• Mobile-cellular penetration in developed countries has reached saturation levels, recording penetration rates of over 100 per cent and a growth of only one per cent during the past year; in developing countries, by contrast, growth in mobile subscriptions is still buoyant, at 20 per cent, with no sign of a slowdown .
• Fixed-broadband penetration in developed countries had climbed to almost 24 per cent by end 2010, and growth is slowing, suggesting that saturation levels are being reached, while it stands at only 4.2 per cent in developing countries
  .
• Wireless-broadband Internet access remains the strongest growth sector and mobile broadband is mushrooming in developing countries, growing by 160 per cent between 2009 and 2010 (although starting from low levels).
• Internet users have doubled over the past five years, and there are now more than two billion Internet users worldwide. Growth rates in developing countries are high (14 per cent between 2009 and 2010), and absolute numbers are driven by large countries such as Brazil, China, India, Nigeria and the Russian Federation.  By end 2010, around 30 per cent of the world’s population was online – up from around 12 per cent in 2003 and six per cent in 2000 .
• The proportion of households with access to the Internet is growing steadily, especially in developing countries , where around 16 per cent of households had access to the Internet at end 2010, as compared with 66 per cent in developed countries.

Kenya has been listed among the “dynamic” economies by ITU having proved the their IDI considerable over the last year. Other dynamic economies are (in alphabetical order) Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Iceland, Macao (China), Moldova, Morocco, Oman, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Viet Nam and the Russian Federation.

Kenya was ranked 115 in the IDI in 2010 up from 116 in 2008.

Top 5 in IDI in each region;

Compared to the Gross National income, Kenya ranks as one of the most expensive with Kenyans spending an average of 33.1% of their incomes on the internet while Ugandans spends 30.2% and Tanzanians 31.4% of their GNIs. Kenya looks to be more expensive than even Namibia (11.9%) and Nigeria (27.2%). Algerians (3.0% )spends the least of their incomes on ICT services in Africa. Egyptians spends 3.5% while South Africans spends 5.3%. Rwandans spend 56.9% of their GNI on ICT services.

So Kenyans have to either increase their national income or simple reduce the use of ICT services the latter will be suicidal.

Read the whole report here