Meet The Digital Natives Trailblazing Internet Use in Africa: 6 facts you need to know

At the start of Africa’s mobile revolution in 1998, there were less than 2 million mobile subscriptions, says data from the African Development Bank (AfDB), and 86% of these were in South Africa. By 2008, South Africa’s “market share” had been whittled down to 18%, and today, latest data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) indicates that there are 630 million mobile subscriptions on the continent.

In that time, there is a generation that has grown up with no inkling of what the world was like before mobile phones, or the Internet. Meet the “digital natives”, defined as a young person between the ages of 15 and 24 with five years or more experience using the Internet.

1. About 5.2% of the world population is considered to be digital native, shows latest data from the ITU in a report titled Measuring the Information Society 2013. It may seem like a tiny fraction, but the overall figure masks great variations between and within nations, from a low of 0.13% to a high of 16%.

Where the online population is concerned, youth are clearly overrepresented, so when we take digital natives as a proportion of youth, globally the figure shoots up to 30%. The global leader is South Korea, where virtually all young people – 99.6% - are digital natives.

2. In Africa, the fraction of youth said to be digital native is about 9.2%. Morocco’s youth are in the lead, with nearly half of young people aged 15-24 (45.8%) in 2012 being digital natives, followed by Mauritius (42.8%), Tunisia (36.7%), and Egypt (34.9%).

But position five is a country you may have written off, for its abysmal economic performance in the past fifteen years. It’s Zimbabwe, with fully 25% of its young people considered digital natives, ahead of more prosperous countries like South Africa (18.6%), Nigeria (16%), or Kenya, that gets much of Africa’s IT accolades and is angling to be the continent’s “Silicon savannah” – about 18% of Kenya’s youth are considered digital natives.

A country will have a high percentage of digital natives if it has relatively high levels of youth and at least medium levels of Internet use; high levels of Internet use; or some combination of the two.

Having a big youth bulge, and a large rural population, tends to bring this figure down, such as in Nigeria.

3. Digital nativism is correlated with secondary, and especially tertiary education levels. Zimbabwe is Africa’s most literate country, so that makes its reading habits (and by extension, its media and information-seeking habits) rather insulated from the day-to-day vagaries of the economy.

4. However, the relationship between primary education enrolment and digital nativism is not as all as strong as in the higher levels, the data shows. This wrinkles the rationale behind school laptop programs, such as the one promised by Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta – which seems to have now been quietly shelved after being mired in corruption allegations and opposition.

To be fair, it takes time for children to grow and the impact of having laptops around them to become clearly measurable. Rwanda took the plunge and its One Laptop per Child project has seen over 203,000 laptops distributed to primary school pupils, making it the third largest deployment of laptops to schools globally after Peru and Uruguay.

5. In sheer numbers, however, Egyptian digital natives are in the lead – 5.5 million Egyptian youth are digital natives, followed by Nigeria (5.1m), Morocco (2.8m), South Africa (1.8m) and Sudan (1.7m).

Algeria (1.5m), Kenya (1.5m), Tanzania (1.5m), Tunisia (796,000) and Zimbabwe (700,000) round out the top ten. Globally, China is the country with the biggest number of digital natives, at 75 million of them, followed by the US at 41 million.

6. Although in Africa only one in ten young people may be digital natives, those young people are often their nation’s drivers in terms of getting online and trailblazing a new digital future for their country.

This is especially true in the countries that have a low Internet penetration overall, such as Eritrea, Burundi, Sierra Leone and Niger.

In these countries, the percentage of young people online is more than twice as the population as a whole. This places digital natives in a unique position, and so as early adopters, they drive forward ICT use in their country; and their skills will be in great demand as economies becomes more connected.

“Paradoxically, while most of the literature on digital natives focuses on high- income countries, the most important location for the application of this concept is likely to be the developing world,” the ITU report states.

In richer countries, there is less of a gap in Internet use between the youth population and the general population, and so the digital natives actually have less of an impact.

WORTH KNOWING

•Digital immigrants: People born before the internet, and have migrated to the modern technology. Some are the parents of the digital natives.

•Digital descendants: Born into and brought up in the world of digital itself and introduced from start to its ways and universe. They are pure digital citizens, untouched by old technology. A few are children of the older digital natives.

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