Tough road towards Africa’s Information Society despite progress

Abstract

Despite the progress made in fulfilling her promises for developing ICTs and an enabling ecosystem for an all-englobing digital economy, through a jump from basic voice/text services to broadband solutions and worthwhile achievements in financial inclusion, Africa still lags behind the rest of the world as per the rate of implementation of the 15 action lines of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the key global movement for interconnectedness towards development, which started in 2005. This overall assessment comes out of the 2019 Annual Africa Regional Review of WSIS Implementation which has just ended in Yaounde under the coordination of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). Deliberations were held under the theme: “Information and Communication Technologies for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals” in order to generate cardinal discussion points from Africa at the 2020 WSIS forum to be held in Geneva next April.