Digital Literacy in Africa: Exploring its Relationship with Infrastructure, Policy, and Social Inequality

ABSTRACT

Digital literacy has become indispensable for individuals in the contemporary techno-centric world and imperative for governments to promote equitable growth. Using the fixed effects models to analyze a panel sample of 25 African countries from 2017 to 2021, the authors describe the overall situation of digital literacy in Africa and examine its relationship with ICT infrastructure, policy, and social inequality. The results show that the African countries exhibit a substantial and stable disparity in digital literacy. Availability of ICT infrastructure increases digital literacy, while social inequality decreases it. They also find that digital literacy and digital inclusion policies can overcome the barriers of availability and affordability of ICT infrastructure. In addition, digital literacy and digital inclusion policies have the potential to be mutually supportive, reinforcing each other’s role in promoting social equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital literacy
• social inequality
• infrastructure
• policy
• Africa
• panel data
• country level

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 W3C is dedicated to the development of international Web standards. For example, it publishes the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 to “provide a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible to users with disabilities” (W3C 2021).

2 Usage measures the level of connectivity and is the weighted sum of the following five indicators: Internet users, fixed-line broadband subscribers, mobile subscribers, gender gap in Internet access, and gender gap in mobile phone access. Quality refers to the quality of the available infrastructure for access, which indicates the convenience of using Internet sites and related services. Infrastructure measures the coverage of Internet access infrastructure, which is an indicator of the ease of connectivity for people. Electricity means powering the infrastructure and hardware required for Internet access, which is the weighted sum of urban electricity access and rural electricity access (Economist Impact 2022).

3 Price measures the cost of access relative to income and is the weighted sum of the following four indicators: smartphone cost (handset), mobile phone cost (prepaid tariff), mobile phone cost (postpaid tariff), and fixed-line monthly broadband cost. Competitive environment is the weighted sum of average revenue per user, wireless operators’ market share, and broadband operators’ market share, which usually results in lower prices for consumers (Economist Impact 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Program (2023THZWJC10) and Tsinghua Lab Research Program on Computational Communication and Intelligent Media.