World Dialogue on Regulation

Lead centre: LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand - Contact: Alison Gillwald

Every society needs a guiding vision, policy certainty and transparent regulation to promote the potential of ICTs for economic growth and poverty alleviation, global competitiveness and growing employment opportunities and skills provision. Research is critical to establishing the needs of countries and groups within them, and to conceptualising approaches that are likely to be effective in resolving country-specific problems. Unlike other parts of the world committed to participatory policy formulation processes, there are few, and in most countries no, independent agencies contributing to these processes in the broader public interest on the basis of rigorous applied research. African research based on a sound body of data, information and analysis is urgently needed to assess the issues and inform African decision-making in relation to policies, regulations and investment.

Until such time that the information required for effective and participatory governance is available from national sources – national regulatory agencies and statistical offices - there remains a critical need for some indicator development and measurement of the ICT sector. While small research gains have been made over the last few years through first supply-side, and then demand-side studies, the development of appropriate indicators and the measurement of ICT developments on the continent remains limited, fragmented and uneven.

The development of an African e-Index evolves out the two baseline line studies conducted by the Research ICT Africa! (RIA!) network. The first, the ICT Sector Performance Review, drawing on the LIRNE.NET methodology, attempted to measure the sector outcomes of policy and regulatory strategies against national ICT objectives for various countries and provided a baseline study for annual supply side updates. The second, the Fair Access to ICT Report (FAIR) sought to assess Internet penetration against cost of services and regulatory environments. Both studies developed new indicators and methodologies to explain the relations between policy and regulatory frameworks and the development of information societies and network economies in developing country contexts. The studies also revealed the difficulties of trying to quantify and measure ICT penetration meaningfully in a developing country context and the difficulties of trying to draw correlations with pricing and regulatory practices.

The studies nevertheless began to explore relatively uncharted territory in terms of developing assessment and analytical tools to understand what was and wasn’t working in terms of creation conditions for improved ICT access and usage in developing countries. Both studies examined the policy, strategies and practices of governments, regulators and operators against ICT practices and usage. What this e-Index seeks to do is measure what is happening in the ICT sector from the lens of users, consumers and those marginalised from services and to analyse access, demand and usage patterns in response to services delivered as a result of operators’ responses to policy and regulatory framework. In other words, the supply side of the equation must be allied with an adequate understanding of the demand side. In particular, what factors impact on users and consumers of ICT technologies? How much are users and consumers prepared to allocate to a basket of communication technologies? How do consumers access communications technologies?

The African e-Index will be an on-going study which will cyclically examine household and individual usage, SME and enterprise usage and government usage on a tri-annual basis with the sector performance study on the supply side updated annually. The baseline household and individual user survey was conducted in 10 African countries during 2004 and the findings will be made available for comment by the end of April. More than 14,500 households in 10 countries across the continent in urban and rural settings were surveyed with the use of reliable sampling techniques and comprehensive questionnaires. These include Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

The data has been collected so that gender, urban, income and other significant factors can be disaggregated to understand penetration and usage patterns. These are contextualised within the policy and regulatory environments and market development of each country. During 2005 focus groups will be conducted in West, Central, Eastern and Southern Africa to mine the valuable data from the survey and to provide greater understanding of the results. The output has the potential to provide policy makers and regulators with ICT usage data, metadata and analysis in order to assess the outcomes of their policy and regulation against their intentions.

In 2005 an SME survey focuses on how small businesses make use of ICTs. The Small Business E-access and E-usage Index aims at understanding the impact of ICTs on private sector development, how ICTs can contribute to a vibrant SME sector and economic growth by furthering the understanding how entrepreneurs make use of ICTs.

Due to resource constraints and due to the importance of the small and medium enterprise sector, RIA will only survey this sector in 2005 and not the entire private sector. RIA! is prioritising this sector in which most of the world’s poor works because of its acknowledged role in economic development, poverty reduction and employment creation in Africa.

The development of the African e-Index contributes to the theme of Diversifying Participation in Network Extension by providing critical information necessary to creating the enabling policy and regulatory frameworks for alternative forms of investment and network and service innovation. It does so by:

• devising appropriate indicators to assess the access strategies and usage patterns of households to communications, the individuals within them and those marginalised from communications services, and to extrapolate these to the national level;
• analysing the data in order to understand the impact of policy and regulatory frameworks and operators responses to them on the intended layers of beneficiaries, namely the citizenry of the country; enterprise and government.
• adopting baseline methodologies that will allow the study to be conducted accurately again in order to determine real trends and patterns;
• disseminating the findings the research in the form of a public domain e-Index which is accessible to state, commercial and civil society entities to inform their public policy and sector development activities;
• presenting the annual results of the Africa e-Index at the national level through in-country government briefings on the national studies and the comparative analysis;
• leveraging and synergising the initiatives by the UN ICT Task Force and the International Telecommunications Union arising from the WSIS 1 Geneva Plan of Action to develop global indicators and resources to Measure the Information Society through layered household/individual, enterprise and government usage surveys;
• drawing attention to the importance of developing national statistics to inform decision-making, and by contributing to the gaps by providing the kind of data and analysis policy formulators and other decision-makers require in order to be effective and achieve developmental outcomes; and
• building the research capacity and body of indigenous knowledge required for effective and appropriate policy formulation and regulation throughout Africa.

The tri-annual surveys on these three areas of ICT usage together with the annual supply side sector survey will, through time, provide critical time-series data that will make possible the understanding of user trends and policy and regulatory impacts.