New Telegraph

ITU: Nigeria has improved in data affordability

…meets 2% target

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has given Nigeria a thumbs up in the quest to reduce the cost of data. Specifically, the organisation said the cost of access to broadband service reduced in the country in 2020. With this, the country is said to have met the affordability target set by the body. According to the UN Broadband Commission on Sustainable Development’s Target 2 for 2025, entry-level broadband service in developing countries should not cost more than two per cent of monthly Gross National Income (GNI) per capita.

ITU, in its “Affordability of ICT Services 2020” report, said Nigeria, alongside eight other developing countries, met the two per cent target last year. Other countries said to have improved in the affordability assessment include Moldova, Morocco, Botswana, Iraq, Libya, Maldives, Nauru, and Mongolia. According to the report, the global median price for entry-level mobile-broadband services in 2020 fell within that target, at 1.7 per cent.

However, the median price for entry-level fixedbroadband, that is, at least five GB, services was considerably above the target, at 2.9 per cent of GNI per capita. Pointing out the difference between the developed and developing countries, ITU said broadband in developing countries had a median price of 2.5 per cent of GNI per capita, compared with only 0.6 per cent in developed countries.

“Over the past year, the number of economyies that met the two per cent affordability target increased by six: out of the 190 economies covered in the report, 106 have achieved the target, while 84 economies have prices above the target,” the report stated. “Developing countries were the main drivers of this global price decline.

However, a pronounced affordability gap remains between developed and developing countries. While 4G networks cover areas with about 85 per cent of the world’s population, nearly half of those people were still offline in 2020,” it added. Commenting on the report, ITU Secretary-General, Houlin Zhao, said: “The declining price trend for mobile and fixed broadband is encouraging, but we need to strengthen our efforts to lower the prices in developing countries. “While COVID-19 has spurred the digital transformation, we need to connect all people to schooling, work, health, business and government services.

We build up the infrastructure for a better future, not only for challenging times.” Also, the Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau Doreen Bogdan-Martin, said: “ICT services in the majority of least developed countries (LDCs) remain prohibitively expensive, even for entry-level users. Despite the median price decline in the past year, the mobile broadband dataonly basket was unaffordable in 39 out of 43 LDCs, while the fixed-broadband basket was unaffordable in 32 out of the 33 LDCs for which data are available.”

She noted that for a fixed-broadband service, the median price in developed countries stood at 1.2 per cent of monthly GNI per capita, while in developing countries the median price was much higher, at 4.7 per cent. According to her, out of the 178 economies for which these data were collected, the price was below two per cent in 67 economies and above this threshold in the other 111. “This data makes it clear that we need to rapidly accelerate progress to remove cost barriers to Internet services,” said Executive Director at Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), Sonia Jorge.

“The pandemic not only underlines the critical importance of Internet access in today’s world, but has laid bare the scale of digital inequality that remains. We need ambitious, coordinated action to make affordable, meaningful connectivity available to everyone, with efforts targeted at those least likely to be online, including poor and rural populations, women and people living in the least developed countries. As the world becomes increasingly digital, the need to expand connectivity to everyone becomes ever more urgent,” she added.

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