Africa: I.T. infrastructure a catalyst to growth

Vinod Kumar of Tata observes on his blog that infrastructure is the catalyst for a fully connected Africa. I couldn't agree more:

Growing Africa’s connectivity is the key to nurturing Africa’s technology development. African governments and the private sector are investing heavily in communications infrastructure, with an estimated $21 billion being plowed into telecom-related infrastructure. This investment has been put to use on project such as EASSY (Eastern Africa Submarine cable system) and WACS (West Africa Cable System), which help grow the communications market in Africa and support further technological progress.

Vinod's view mirrors my own experiences in Ghana where bandwidth continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, unlike Lesotho where bandwidth prices fell by 67%, Ghana is yet to benefit from the added bandwidth. This is attributable mostly to last mile challenges, but I also suspect some collusion among the few dominant ISPs with the resources to leverage the improved bandwidth, while continuing to keep prices artificially high for now.