Electronic commerce for development: a conceptual analysis and future research agenda for Africa

ABSTRACT

Despite the e-commerce boom worldwide, Africa ranks last on all indicators of e-commerce readiness, indicating that it is not sufficiently benefiting from this practice's economic, social, and human development potential. This paper explores the role of research in promoting knowledge on how e-commerce can contribute to Africa’s development. It uses Jakubik’s knowledge creation theory and the scientometric perspective of knowledge diffusion to identify six main conceptual themes that characterize knowledge creation and diffusion through research on e-commerce in Africa using four different science mapping methods. Results show that knowledge created and disseminated through academic research on e-commerce in Africa is not adapted to what practitioners and policymakers need to better understand how e-commerce can promote development in Africa. We discuss six main points regarding this issue and propose recommendations for addressing them in future research.

KEYWORDS:

• E-commerce
• Africa
• development
• knowledge creation theory
• knowledge diffusion
• review

Acknowledgements

I heartily acknowledge Enow George, COO of Swychr⁵ (a financial technology company) and CEO of eNow Digital⁶ (e-commerce platform), for his critical feedback on interpreting the results and usefulness of proposed recommendations for future research on e-commerce in Africa. As an active stakeholder in Africa's e-commerce space for the past ten years, his input was critical for validating the relevance of this study for practitioners.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tn_unctad_ict4d17_en.pdf.

2 African countries dominate the chart of countries with low human development index (HDI): https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-country; https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks; African countries also have the lowest GDP share of the world: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD.

3 https://clarivate.com/products/scientific-and-academic-research/research-discovery-and-workflow-solutions/webofscience-platform/.

4 See page 25 of the bibliometrix package manual for details on the algorithms and formulas used in the calculations: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bibliometrix/bibliometrix.pdf.

5 https://play.google.com/store/search?q=swychr&c=apps.

6 https://enowdigital.com/.

7 https://www.bibliometrix.org/home/.