CHALLENGES FOR DIGITIZATION

The digital technologies over the past two decades have been substantial, marking one of history’s most rapid rates of adoption of new technologies. The number of personal computers (PCs) in use worldwide surged from 100 million in 1990 to 1.4 billion by 2010. There were 10 million mobile phone users in the world in 1990; today there are more than 5 billion.2  The number of Internet users grew at an even more rapid rate over the same decades, from 3 million to 2 billion.3  To put that into context, only two decades ago there were as many Internet users in the world as people in the city of Madrid; today, there are as many people online as are living in all of Asia. The surge in ICT use has not been restricted to the developed world. In Africa, for example, more than half a billion people today connect to mobile networks.4 The explosive growth of ICT services is presenting policymakers with three key challenges.
The first challenge is to establish standard performance indicators to measure the extent to which ICT is being assimilated in societies. During most of the sector’s development, ICT stakeholders focused primarily on access, building the networks that today connect much of the planet; they devised metrics accordingly. In a world of near ubiquity in terms of access, policymakers need a new way to look at the ICT sector.
The second challenge concerns the lack of tools to determine the impact that the mass adoption of connected digital technologies and applications is having on societies and economies. With practical, reliable tools to measure the benefits of digitization, governments   could potentially be more ambitious in developing and investing in the ICT sector.
The third challenge is for policymakers to adopt new policy tools to accelerate digitization and reap its accompanying benefits. Over the past two decades, policymakers established rules to enhance access to communication services — setting policies that introduce competition and promote infrastructure sharing, for example. Now they need to gain a similar understanding of the ways in which they can encourage adoption and boost the usage of digital applications by consumers, businesses, and public institutions. Therefore we need to look foward towards the global dimensions so as to cope with the technologies.

         By Shayo Issah