Corporations, development organisations and governments have launched ambitious programmes to 'connect the unconnected', reasoning that this creates economic growth and inclusive development. This paper contrasts these actors' discourses with evidence from academic research. The evidence suggests a highly uneven economic impact of Internet connectivity across geographies and social strata. The analysed sources of discourse (African ICT policies and reports by international organisations) instead propose Grand Visions of connectivity, attributing a self-evident positive, widespread, and transformational impact to the Internet. We discuss technological determinism, acontextual modernism, and optimistic simplism as underlying this contrast, calling for more reflexivity towards the opportunities of 'digital development'.
We propose the construction of a Digital Knowledge Economy Index, quantified by way of measuring content creation and participation through digital platforms, namely the code sharing platform GitHub, the crowdsourced encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and Internet domain registrations and estimating a fifth sub-index for the World Bank Knowledge Economy Index for year 2012. This approach complements conventional data sources such as national statistics and expert surveys and helps reflect the underlying digital content creation, capacities, and skills of the population. An index that combines traditional and novel data sources can provide a more revealing view of the status of the world's digital knowledge economy and highlight where the (un)availability of digital resources may actually reinforce inequalities in the age of data.
Connectivity throughout the world is rapidly changing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Sub-Saharan Africa. The region is quickly moving from a state of digital dis-connectivity, to a state where hundreds of millions of citizens are connected to the digital economy. This rapid change in connectivity has generated a lot of hope and excitement for the potentials of an emergent knowledge economy in the region. Sub-Saharan Africa can, in theory, compete in the production of all manner of digital goods and services with anywhere else in the world. This article surveys the current state of our ongoing multi-year research into the topic, based on empirical research into a range of sectors and domains (including computer code writing, online freelancing, business process outsourcing, and digital entrepreneurship).
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