Monday, October 03, 2011

Nepal: the great digital divide

Mobile cellular growth is slowing worldwide. In developed countries, the mobile market is reaching saturation levels with an average 116 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants at the end of 2010 and a marginal growth of 1.6% from 2009-2010. But the mobile penetration in developing countries is huge. The developing world is increasing its share of mobile subscriptions from 53% of total mobile subscriptions at the end of 2005 to 73% at the end of 2010.

In the context of Nepal, compared to fixed telephone subscriptions (2.81), mobile subscriptions (30.69) is relatively very high and expected to grow rapidly. But Internet users are still very low, due to lack of access to computers and the Internet. Where they do have the Internet (mostly in urban areas), it is expensive, unreliable and has a low bandwidth.

Nepal is a mountainous country where most of the countryside is remote  and about 86 percent of population lives in rural areas and dependent on subsistence agriculture for their livelihood and availability of electricity is limited to about 18 percent of the total population, while the rural population has just about 5 percent. In Africa, an estimated 90% of the rural population remain without electricity.

The disparity in access to ICTs between the world's richest and poorest countries,  the difference in people's chance of getting training and skills that will enable them to use ICTs effectively - the Digital Divide is evident. While more than 94% of people in Norway can access the web, a mere 0.5% in Ethopia do. Even though number of countries, including Estonia, Finland and Spain have declared access to the Internet as a legal right for citizens and 71% of the population in developed countries are online while only 21% of the population in developing countries are connected.

The access to technology is crucial. 'A global explosion in the use of mobile phones with over 5 billion subscriptions', 'double Internet users since 2005..': these are definitely some of many encouraging facts. The technology however needs to be affordable, sustainable and scalable. In Nepal, the financial, social, geographical, political and infrastructural challenges are greater and even though there are opportunities to implement technological interventions, impact is hard to achieve.

Internet Users per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
   %     0.20  0.24   0.31   0.38    0.45     0.80   1.14   1.41    1.73   1.97   6.78

Fixed Internet subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
    %      0.05     0.06     0.08     0.10      0.11     0.16     0.22     0.28        -              -          -

Fixed Broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
    %   -         0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00    0.00   0.00   0.04   0.03   0.05    0.38

Fixed telephone lines per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
     % 1.09     1.19     1.28  1.42   1.56   1.78     2.20   2.47   2.79  2.76  2.81

Mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants
Year | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
   %  0.04     0.07     0.09  0.31   0.44    0.83    4.16  11.52  14.53   19.02   30.69


(Source: ITU and Upgrading Development: Can technology alleviate poverty?)


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