Nigeria Key to Helping Connect Africa

Nigeria is the only African country of the six that make up 55% of an estimated 3.9 billion people - more than half the world's population - that will still be offline and unable to connect regularly to the Internet, if at all, by the end of this year.

According to The State of Broadband 2016 report released by the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development last week, the other countries are in Asia - China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, which it says has overtaken the United States to become the world's second largest Internet market with 333 million users.

In a video post, lead author of the report Phillippa Biggs said focus needs to be on these densely populated countries to ensure that the next 1.5 billion people are connected online as quickly as possible, rather than the historical view that attention should be on Africa and parts of the Arab region or poorer Asia.

Biggs explains why more than half the world is still offline video presentation: "Historically, attention has tended to focus on supply side issues of availability of network, infrastructure and coverage. Nowadays, attention is shifting so much more to the demand side including affordability issues and literacy, people's ability to access content in their own language which are more increasingly minority languages."

Of the 48 UN-designated Least Developed Countries - 34 of which are in Africa, it is estimated that only around one in seven people will still be online at the end of 2016.

The report also says the lowest levels of Internet usage are found in sub-Saharan Africa, with less than 3% of the population using the Internet in a number of countries including Chad (2.7%), Sierra Leone (2.5%), Niger (2.2%), Somalia (1.8%) and Eritrea (1.1%).

The Commission, which publishes the report annually to measure broadband access against its five key advocacy targets set in 2011, says only five of the 48 LDCs have achieved the target of providing basic fixed broadband costing less than 5% of monthly GNI - or Gross National Income. However, the LDCs are expected to attain a target of getting 15% of their population online by the end of 2016.

Other highlights show that the number of countries with a National Broadband Plan has grown in six years from 102 to 151 today and there has been a slight widening in the Internet user gender gap of 11% in 2015 to 12% in 2016, equating to 257 million more men online than women.

Also, 91 economies now have over 50% of their population online, up from 79 in 2015, and there has been a change in the top ten countries for Internet which were all located in Europe as at 2014 as Bahrain (ranked 7th) and Japan (ranked 9th) have joined the group this year.