At 1.07 billion, the population of Africa is more than three times the combined population of North America. However, only about 15 percent of the Africa’s population have access to the Internet, compared with North America’s 78.6 percent. Meanwhile, Asia has an estimated 1.08 billion Internet users—more than Africa’s total population.
It is often said that the Internet has improved the way people do things but the disparity in the figures reported by Internet World Stats is unsettling. Due to this concern, a handful of companies and organizations from the U.S. and the U.K. have come together to bring Internet access to more people in developing nations.
Dubbed as the Alliance for Affordable Internet or A4AI by Google, the project’s main proponent, the effort was launched last October 7, 2013 in Abuja, Nigeria, hoping that eventual access to the vast resources of the Internet at an affordable price may unleash more potentials in the region. Jennifer Cowan from Site Pro News reports:
If A4AI achieves its goal, the two-thirds of the world that is not currently online will be able to connect to the Internet for a reasonable price.
“A4AI has a specific goal in mind: to reach the UN Broadband Commission target of entry-level broadband access priced at less than five percent of monthly income worldwide,” Jennifer Haroon, principal executive of Google’s access program, said in a blog post. “According to the (UN’s International Telecommunication Union), households in the developing world pay roughly 30 percent of monthly income for a fixed connection, so there’s a lot of work to do.”
More specifically, the project aims to make the Internet accessible to about five billion new households by 2023. Such an endeavor can mean much for citizens in these countries who are struggling to improve the quality of life. In California cities, for example, the Internet has helped many entrepreneurs capture their market over the years, and broaden their clientele with help from providers of Sacramento SEO services.
SEO companies, such as Champion Online Marketing, pushed the visibility of these local businesses’ websites so that more people learned about the products and services they offer. Should Google’s initiative succeed, not only will people who do online business in California widen their reach to include Africa, but small business owners in Africa will also thrive locally. With some help from providers of SEO services, Sacramento, companies can make it big in their regions when they’re ready.
(Info from Google Spearheads Effort to Make the Internet Affordable World-Wide, Site Pro News, October 7, 2013)