ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the direction thus proposed, by studying the patterns of use in eleven African countries as described in a detailed survey, from 2011. It discusses the method used in the survey, which was conducted by ‘Research information and communication technology (ICT) Africa’, a South African research institution. The chapter examines the effect of Internet use on social capital in different countries and calculate a macro adjustment to the data. In particular, for the few who accessed ICT networks at home – or more frequently in the workplace, educational institutions, or cybercafes – their usage was constrained by the high costs of communications, not least of all as a result of the high cost of international bandwidth. In such cases, policy-makers might well conclude that entertainment is a less developmental activity compared to providing information on health, nutrition and so on.
