For several decades, international lending agencies have encouraged African governments to reform their telecommunications sector by privatizing the public telephone services, separating and depoliticizing the agencies that regulate the telecommunications sector and opening up competition in the consumer market for telecommunications services. During this period, Africa’s share of the world’s internet hosts and secure servers has declined.
For several decades, African governments have been encouraged to reform their telecommunications sector through:
- Regulatory Separation–formally separating regulatory authority from the executive branch of government.
- Privatization–selling the government’s majority stake in public telecommunications companies.
- Market Liberalization–introducing competition in telecommunications markets.
- Regulatory Depoliticization–making the regulatory authority independent of political influence
Over time, the number of countries pursuing these types of reforms has increased. By 2006, 36 of 53 African countries had separated the regulatory authority from their executive branches of government, 29 privatized their public telecommunications provider, 26 liberalized their telephony markets, and 18 depoliticized their regulatory authority. ((Data for the period 1977-1999 from Henisz, Witold J., Zelner, Bennet A., & Mauro F. Guillen. (2005, December). “The Worldwide Diffusion of Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reform, 1977-1999.” American Sociological Review, 70, 871-897. Data for the period 2000-2007 collected by WIA research team, and reported in Howard, Philip N. “Testing the Leap-Frog Hypothesis: Assessing the Impact of Extant Infrastructure and Telecommunication Policy on the Global Digital Divide.” Information, Communication & Society 10, no. 2 (2007): 133-57.))
These reforms have many consequences: Mobile phones are widely available in many African cities, long-distance calls are cheaper than ever before, and many local entrepreneurs have started new businesses in this sector.
However, one consequence of privatization is that governments find it difficult to provide leadership in developing informational infrastructure for their countries. This is especially true when it comes to internet infrastructure.
GRAPHIC: Policy Reform & IT Infrastructure in Africa
Even though the number of internet hosts around the world has grown significantly since 1990, the relative portion of hosts residing in Africa has actually declined. ((Data on top-level domain names from the “Domain Name Survey” of the Internet Software Consortium. For 2005, the values for hosts were adjusted by Zook (2006) to associate top-level domain names such as *.org and *.com with particular nation-states.)) In 1995, only 1.6 percent of the world’s internet hosts were stationed in African countries, and by 2005 this portion had declined to 0.7 percent. While African governments have come under international pressure to pursue certain kinds of policy reforms, the informational capacity of many African states has, in relative terms, declined.