I read ICTworks, a very informative blog all the time. Earlier this week I saw a blog post titled “facebook is driving ICT adoption in Africa” which inspired this blog post. My intentions are to interrogate that statement and ask whether it is not the increasing use of smart phones that has increase facebook adoption or the other way round or it is a rather more complex web.
I have been following with keen interest how people in Ghana are adopting facebook, twitter and other social networking tools and ICT in general. Last year checkfacebook published a month by month statistics on how people are adopting facebook and it showed an increasing rate. In November, Ghana had 277,600 facebook users, 68.7% of which are males and the rest female. Of this number, about 48% are between the ages of 18-24 and 34% for ages 25-34. In October, it had below 200,000 facebookers from Ghana.
These statistics gave me an idea the rate of increase of ICT adoption. But upon interrogating the issue further, I realised that I may be wrong. People are making decisions to buy smartphones because they would like to get on the facebook train, update their statuses and tweet or use one social networking platform or the other. Or shall I say people are making decisions to get onto facebook because they have some smart phone or the other?
So, facebook may actually be driving the use of smartphones and not necessarily ICT. ICT’s are far broader than that and even though i conceed that it will have a long term effect on ICT adoption, government and organisations need to do more to drive ICT adoption.
By the end of last year, the total Internet penetration of Ghana is still about 4.0% and broadband penetration is less than 0.1%. There are less than 100,000 PCs in Ghana and the ICT skills level is nothing to write home about. Government ICT systems are infantile and companies/organisations are still struggling to deploy IT systems. Educational institutions are still teaching old out-of-date curriculla and more.
And oh, I forgot that Internet is very expensive and highly unrealiable in Ghana and most parts of Africa. If the rate at which these indicators were increasing was was commensurate with facebook adoption, I would conclude that Africa is adopting ICT. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This is not to belittle however, the immense contributions the mobile industry or should I say facebook is making towards ICT adoptions.
In order not to delve into the more complicated area of ICT adoption which involves amongst other things, use of ICT equipments, intensity of use of connectivity solutions and intensity of computer use and skills levels, I would simply add that we are at the risk of reducing the digital divide debate to a mobile adoption instead of ICT adoption. Can we realistically say that mobile adoption equals ICT adoption? I say no but it will be great to read your thoughts and criticisms.
Technology is surely changing the way we do things - good and bad, the reason some school of thought is of the view that technology is neutral. I will not talk about technology neutrality today but rather share my views on the facebook phenomenon and how it is gradually catching up in Ghana, and why I think it is for all the right reasons.
mind blowing to see several hundreds of Ghanaian youth throng Labone, a surburb of Accra to meet virtual friends, have fun and above all eat ‘Waakye’, a nutritious and delicious Ghanaian delicacy made from rice and beans. It was simply amazing the kind of people I saw there. So facebook became the enabler if I may of organising this new generation of Ghanaians, full of energy and zeal. Now, I kept wondering to myself what next to expect of social media such as these in Ghana. I just think there are countless possibilities and I just hope we can take advantage of them to empower the people more.
