South Africa fares impressively in technology connectivity

SOUTH Africa has fared impressively in the Connectivity Scorecard in the category of Efficiency and Resource-driven Economies while African counterparts Botswana, Tunisia, Kenya and Nigeria are lowly ranked.

This was revealed in the latest Connectivity Scorecard, a unique study commissioned by Nokia Siemens Networks. The study is based on the use of information and communication technologies.

Out of 10, South Africa scored a satisfactory 5.76.

However, its African counterparts fared badly with Botswana (3.98), Tunisia (3.50) and Nigeria (1.30) scoring low rankings. Kenya scored 1.75

The Connectivity Scorecard 2009, which has doubled the number of countries covered in 2008, ranks the United States first in the group of 25 innovation-driven economies, while Malaysia leads a table of 25 resource and efficiency-driven economies.

The rankings are determined by the measurement of each country against two criteria – infrastructure and usage plus skills – in the realms of business, government and consumer, with weightings of each of the three tailored to each country. Low scores reflect gaps in a country’s infrastructure, usage or both.

“At a time when governments around the world are looking to jump start their economies with a variety of stimuli packages, the Connectivity Scorecard shows that every single one of them, even the United States, has plenty of room to develop their ICT infrastructure and improve the actual use of it to the benefit of both the economy and society,” said Professor Loernard Waverman, who conducted the study.

“Communications networks are the infrastructure of the 21st century and these networks are very large construction programs. There is great potential for them in using ICT to stimulate growth.”—