Improved access to development information in Africa

Abstract

"Economic development in Africa will depend heavily on the development of the information sector. Countries will need the ability to communicate efficiently with local and overseas markets to determine where they may have comparative advantages for supplying their products to consumers to purchase essential imports, based on current prices and services. Many of the economic development problems facing African countries have scientific and technological components that will require solutions to be developed in Africa by African scientists. It is thus essential that they obtain the means to carry on the necessary research and development and to provide realistic policy options to their governments and society: Lack of information is a critical constraint". Africa's development planning efforts have for too long been hampered by the lack of reliable basic data and information, numerical as well as non-numerical. For long, many African countries have grouped in the dark due to an inadequate information base. "There has been too much of planning without facts and too much of policy making by hunches and intuition" (Adedeji, 1989). In regard to the sharing of information, African states have continued to live in a state of isolation from one another resulting in little knowledge about each other than they know about the countries of the North. Needless to say that the outside world knows more, much more, about Africa than Africans themselves know about each other.