Asia Leads in Internet Use

According to Internet World Stat website, Asia leads in the world with One Billion people using internet. That is one sixth of the world population followed by Europe, 500 million people.

Africa is fifth after Latin America with 110 million people using internet services. When you come into penetration, North America is leading.

Although there has been a growth in internet users, Africa stands with 5.7 percent compared to 94.3 percent in the world. Africa has 118 million internet users the growth of five times bigger since 2006 from 22 million users.

Africa’s top internet countries per 2011 statistics are Nigeria followed by Egypt. In East Africa Kenya takes the lead with 44 percent, Tanzania without being mentioned.

Since 2007 the biggest growth of internet users has taken place in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and lately Rwanda. The number of users has more than doubled within a year. The reason why Tanzania is lagging behind is language breakdown to use the internet effectively.

Although English is officially used, Swahili still dominates and is a mother tongue in Tanzania. Google website has been translated into Kiswahili but most citizens cannot afford to use it due to computer illiteracy.

Computer literacy is being taught in schools but there is no access of computers and skilled teachers to train. Most of the teaching is done in theory with no practice.

With this digital divide, is Tanzania ready for Digital Migration by 2015?

This was revealed today at the training when the trainer took participants through different websites journalists can use to find information relevant to their topics.