Less than 4% of Africans are online

As BBC News reports, less than four out of 100 Africans currently use the Internet. Broadband access, a common feature in most European countries which provides both faster as well as cheaper Internet access, is available to less than 1%.

These are just two of the findings that the BBC reports from the 2 day Connect Africa Summit that currently takes place in Kigali, Rwanda.

While these overall figures look indeed quite daunting, overall growth in Internet use is exceptionally high in Africa: while the figures of Internet World Stats currently show only 34 million Internet users in the entire African continent, that figure is currently also growing at a more than just "healthy" 874.6% - putting it way ahead of Asia with "just" a 302% growth rate, effectively making it the fastes growing market for Internet technology in the world.

Namibia is currently estimated to have a total of 80600 Internet users - up from 30000 back in 2000 this means that the usage penetartion of the Namibian population has grown to 3.9%, while the growth rate of that market in Namibia is a healthy 168.7% (Source: Africa Internet Usage and Populations Statistics).

The Government of Burindi also puts some absolute figures to the market in Africa: that has significantly improved to an USD 8 billion in 2005 (up from just USD 3.5 billion in 2000), yet Africa has continued to fall behind in overall connectivity when compared to the rest of the world (which obviously had their big connectivity boost in the 90ies of the last century already and as such only have a moderately growing market these days).

ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré thus demands a "Marshall Plan for ICT infrastructure development in Africa" - with less than 8 years left to meet the 2015 targets of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG), drastic steps are certainly required - there are still a lot of "red flags" in the MDG Report 2007 Progress Chart, one of them being the "very low access" rate for Internet users in Sub-Saharan Africa, which in turn stand for no progress or even a deteriorating situation.

In the technology sphere, that means providing easy access to information and communication technology for more than half of the continent's population within eight years - a pretty tough call, even if the current growth rates in Afria do indeed look promising.