Monday, 13 October 2008

1.3 Page 40/41 - Activity 1

Why might countries like Niger be on the wrong side of then digital divide?

I researched this query using the CIA World Factbook, the site allowed me to search for information on more than 1000 countries, so the information was easy to access. I discovered that the economic state of Niger, in particular, is very poor. For example; 63% of the population is below the poverty line, and they have to import all of there 220 million kilowatts of electrical power. This means that electricity might be too precious to be consumed by powering things like laptops, computers and telephones.
In addition to this Niger as a country receives as much as 515.4 million dollars in economic aid, this shows me that the country is very poor and may not be able to afford luxuries such as computers. Moreover there is a national debt of 2.1 billion dolllars, estimated, that Niger owed back to it's partners, that include France.
When I looked at the communication figures for Niger, I see that 24,000 out of the 13,272,679 population had mainline telephones, 900,000 had mobile and celluar phones and there was 40,000 were internet users.
I think that Niger are the other side of the digital divide because of the poor state of the economy, it is very obvious when we can see the very low percentages of people have pretty basic things by our standards.

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