Africa is developing its digital infrastructure with the support of know-how and technology from Silicon Valley. Is it giving the tech giants too much power? Yellow is the color of South African telecommunication giant MTN. The market slogan Y’ello is plastered on billboards along South African highways, promising bargain offers. As one of Africa’s front-runners on the digital scene, MTN has also embarked into the Arab market.
But the race to control Africa’s digital market is dominated by others, like US tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook, as well as China’s Huawei. Their declared goal is to create a digital infrastructure for Africans by providing better access for those people who had formerly had no or very little access to the web.
It’s an ambitious project. According to a recent study by the World Bank, only one in five people in sub-Saharan Africa has internet access. This is well below the world average, despite countries like Kenya and Liberia leading the way with an internet penetration of over 80%.
Sociologist Michael Kwet warns of the dangers of Silicon Valley’s plans for Africa — a scenario which he calls digital colonialism. The problem, in Kwet’s eyes, is this: US tech firms are aiming to control the digital ecosystem and therefore the entire movement of data for the continent.
That’s anything but democratic. “A democratic system would be open and we would see a kind of decentralization,” Kwet says.
Read more at: https://www.dw.com/en/digital-colonialism-cheap-internet-access-for-africa-but-at-what-cost/a-48966770
