familiarise ourselves with how e-business is conducted. Digital Divide: The Facts First the figures. The statistics on the basic building block of connectivity — that is the phone lines — are stark. According to the latest UN Human Development Report , industrialised countries, with only per cent of the world’s population, are home to per cent of all Internet users.
Less than per cent of people in South Asia are online even though it is home to one-fifth of the world’s population. The situation is even worse in Africa. With million people, there are only million phone lines. That’s fewer than in Manhattan or Tokyo.
Eighty percent of those lines are in only six countries. There are only million Internet users on the entire continent compared with . million in the UK. Even if telecommunication systems were in place, most of the world’s poor would still be excluded from the information revolution because of illiteracy and a lack of basic computer skills.
In Benin, for example, more than per cent of the population is illiterate. The other per cent are similarly out of luck. Four-fifths of the Websites are in English, a language understood by only one in people on the planet. Source: