International Connectivity and the Digital Divide in Sub-Saharan Africa

Joel Cariolle (1)

1 FERDI - Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International

During the last decades, international connectivity has improved significantly with the worldwide deployment of some 400 fiber submarine cables (SMCs), transmitting more than 99% of international telecommunications. If sub-Saharan African (SSA) has long remained excluded from this interconnection process, the maritime infrastructure network has recently densified and spurred African connectivity catch-up. This paper estimates the impact of SMC deployment on the digital divide in an original sample of 49 SSA countries covering the period 1990-2014. Diff-in-diff (DID) estimations are conducted and highlight the particular contribution of SEACOM and EASSy cables, laid in 2009-2010, to Internet penetration in Eastern and Southern Africa. According to DID estimates these SMCs rollout has yielded a 3-5 percentage-point increase in internet penetration rates in this region compared to the rest of the continent. Triple-difference estimations emphasize conditional factors under which these cables have fostered Internet uptake: enlarged Internet bandwidth per users, lower broadband Internet tariffs, higher investment in the mobile network, improved terrestrial connectivity, and electricity access.

Mots clés: ICT; submarine cables; digital divide; Sub-Saharan Africa; infrastructure; connectivity

Domaines: Economies et finances

Joel Cariolle. International Connectivity and the Digital Divide in Sub-Saharan Africa. 2020. ⟨hal-02865546⟩