By Lucky Masilela
Research by a UK-based company, Cable, found that Somalia has Africa’s lowest data prices.
Tanzania is the best place in East Africa to browse the Internet using a mobile phone, followed by Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The scary side of this survey, which compared the average cost of 1GB of mobile data in 228 countries recently, is that South Africa – the continent’s most developed economy - ranked a lowly 148th .
This is a cause for serious concern for organisations like ours, ZA Central Registry (ZACR), that are working towards the digitisation of the country.
We live in the digital era. Globally the shift is towards making data and Internet connectivity a basic human right. Instead of how tracking how much a dollar can buy or measuring per capita income, we will soon be using per capita access to the Internet to compare the quality of life of countries.
The countries with the best quality of life, all things being equal, are likely to be those whose governments prioritise access to fast and affordable Internet connection.
Africa, the second largest continent after Asia in size and population, accounts for only 11.5 percent (versus Asia’s 50.3 percent) of the world’s Internet users, according to www.internetworldstats.com.
The report also stated that 42.2 percent of Africa’s population has access to the Internet 58.8 percent in Asia. However, this does not compare favourably to the 71.5 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, 87.2 percent in Europe and 90.3 percent in North America.
If access to the Internet is the gateway to civilisation and better delivery of social services and protection of human rights, then affordable data is the currency. The equation is simple: to improve the quality of life for fellow Africans, universal access to the Internet and affordable data is a critical indicator of success.
Covid-19 brought the vital importance of data into sharper focus. The lockdown exposed countries that have not given enough attention to Internet connectivity, because their children were unable to receive tuition remotely, among others.
This perpetuates income inequality and deepens the marginalisation of the poor majority.
ZACR - as the entity managing various .ZA second level domains, such as co.za, net.za, org.za and web.za – recently celebrated topping 1,000,000 domain name registrations, with the majority of these domain names being under .co.za.
We also welcomed the appointment in August this year of Mr. Molehe Wesi as the new CEO of ZA Domain Name Authority (ZADNA).
ZACR and ZADNA have already made strides in the past few weeks to work together to strengthen the South African domain name space and to better position the country to address the backlogs, as revealed by the findings of the Cable survey.
Mr Wesi emphasised the urgency of addressing the backlog, when he said upon his appointment: “It is an honour to be given the opportunity to lead the organization and to ensure that the .za namespace is stable and resilient. I am looking forward to working closely with all stakeholders and to ensure that the management and administration of the namespace comply with international best practise and that .za remains the preferred domain name registered by South Africans“.
We might be ranked 148 th today, but we at ZACR are determined to ensure that nothing stops us from getting our cyberspace and domain name registrations globally competitive through the collaboration with ZADNA and by lobbying all the key stakeholders to lower our data prices.
Lucky Masilela is the CEO of ZACR.
The Star