Nigeria, Africa’s most populated nation, has a personal computer penetration rate of just 4.5 percent, despite having more than 101 million subscribers connected to the various telecommunications networks in Nigeria.
According to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, in spite of Nigeria’s status as one of the continent’s fastest growing telecoms market, coupled with the increasing presence of local PC manufacturing companies such as Omatek Computers and Zinox Technologies, the West African nation only has PC penetration of 4.5 percent.
The survey was carried out by the NBS and Nigeria’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria
(CBN) and was called the Annual Socio-Economic Report: Access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
It showed that more than 95 percent of Nigerians don’t have access to a PC or Internet, while only 0.9 percent actually own PCs.
Furthermore, the survey also revealed that radios and mobile phones are the most widely used ICT devices, while Internet and PC usages are still considerably lower.
“Of the overall Nigerian population with access to mobile phones, nearly half owns the device. Similarly, more than a third own radios, while about a quarter own Televisions (TVs) as well as PCs and Internet access devices, according to the survey.
“The statistics reveal that 82.9 percent of Nigerians had total access (those who owned and those who had access only) to radio and 63.9 percent had access to mobile phones and less than half of the population, 44.7 per cent, had access to TV,” the report stated.
