ICTworks by Inveneo

The fine folks over at oAfrica have complied the Facebook growth rates for the last 18 months and they are stunning.

But before you get too excited, they also put these numbers into perspective by comparing the total number of Facebook users to the total populations of African countries. When you look at these numbers, FB's growth is great, but still quite lacking in mass adoption. Here are some highlights worthy of a raised eyebrow:

18 month user growth rate in selected countries

• Nigeria 154% increase to 4,369,740 FB users
• Ghana 85% increase to 1,146,560 FB users
• Kenya 50% increase to 1,298,560 users

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Facebook adoption across Africa

• 37+ million Facebook users as of December 2011
• 165% median Facebook user growth since July 2010 (114% mean)

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Penetration rates across Africa

• 2.4% median Facebook penetration rate (3.6% mean)
• 36 nations have fewer than 1-in-20 people on Facebook
• 12 nations have fewer than 1-in-100 people on Facebook

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Another way to look at this is that with Nigeria's growth at 150,000 new Facebook users ever month, it would take 4 years to reach everyone in Nigeria, if the 154% growth rate remains the same. But it will probably slow dramatically as oAfrica projects:

Facebook adoption in Africa, although rapidly increasing within most nations at the moment, is starting to slow in more developmentally-advanced countries. Even if Facebook user growth rates settle at 25% annually, it could be ten years until Kenya boasts 30% of the population on Facebook. In 17 months, Kenya’s Facebook user rate has gone from 2% to 3%. South Africa’s is near 10% after increasing from 7%. This growth rate of 50% over 17 months for Kenya and South Africa – which we deem “mature” – suggests the challenges large nations face providing affordable Internet and connecting rural areas. Plus, even when Internet access is available, not everyone wants to use Facebook.

What to make of this all? Facebook is a growing presence in Africa and it is an online juggernaut. But African countries have a long way to go before all their people can get online and enjoy the FB experience.

You know the amazing photograph of the earth at night showing all the lights of population centers around the world. And you've seen the Facebook friendship map that shows where the concentrations of Facebook users are around the globe.

Ian Wojtowicz mashed those two images together to get The UnFacebook World. The dark lines are Facebook usage and the bight yellow dots are where there are population centers that have bright lights at night but no Facebook friends.

Do you notice anything odd about Africa? How about that São Tomé and Príncipe have electricity but no Facebook and the millions in Rwanda, Burundi, and DRC have neither Facebook nor electrical lights at night.

This is a stark visual reminder that not everyone one is on FB, regardless of the hype around Facebook usage doubling in a month across Africa in 2011.

A few years ago, Internet access in Africa was crazy expensive. Entire projects would sink under the weight of a monthly broadband bill, often exceeding staff salaries to be the single largest expense in an ICT intervention.

Fast forward to 2010 and the ITU says that broadband Internet access prices are dropping by more than 50% globally with a special bonus for African countries:

The regional price trends highlight that while ICT prices are falling in all regions of the world, the greatest price drops occurred in Africa, where fixed broadband prices fell by over 55% and mobile cellular prices by 25%.

Despite this encouraging trend, Africa continues to stand out for its relatively high prices. Fixed broadband Internet access in particular remains prohibitively high, and, across the region as a whole, still represented almost three times the monthly average per capita income. Only one out of ten people in Africa is using the Internet.

Before you let that second paragraph depress you, realize that the ITU may need to update the way it records Internet access when mobile data subscriptions account for 99 percent of all Internet access in Kenya and mobile phones are killing the cybercafé business model.

It may be that Internet penetration is actually higher than 10% now that all that African fiber is being used by mobile subscribers vs. fixed line users. After all, Facebook usage in Africa doubled in a month in 2011, with half of its users globally accessing their favorite social network via a mobile device, not a traditional computer.

Since the Arab Spring uprisings, human rights activists worldwide have championed the power of technology, mainly the Internet and mobile phones, as tools for democracy and change. Evidence shows that they are right, social media played a role in bringing down dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa. But other evidence shows that technology actually often reinforces social inequalities in other instances, giving more voice to the powerful, further drowning out the meek cries of the politically weak.

Social media has been successful when all social classes unite to take down the big bad evil
dictators. The Arab Spring is the contemporary poster boy for this movement. The proletariat united, rose up, and took down the bourgeois in Tunisia and Egypt, and is still fighting in Syria, Libya, and other nations. Twitter hashtags and facebook groups were large players in mobilizing protestors, who came from all backgrounds—rich, middle-class, and poor—and simply communicated with their mobile phones to organize mass movements.

It seems logical, then, to assume that social media and technology penetration will lead to more democracy and social justice. The more blackberries in a country, the less the economic disparity. The more rural telecenters, the less political corruption. Or at least so goes the thinking.

Studies show otherwise. To the extent that inequalities between social classes are affected at all by the increase in ICT usage, they often became stronger and disparity increases. In a DFID study in 2005 on telephone use in India (Gujarat), Mozambique, and Tanzania, researchers found the most wealthy and educated people used phones more and with greater frequency, in both urban and rural areas.

Other studies show that not only do more educated and wealthier people have greater access to ICTs, they also value them more, and use their for more development related activities as opposed to entertainment than poorer populations. Furthermore, the rich and smart are far more likely to produce digital content, solidifying the stronghold of the elite in societal knowledge production.

The relationship between ICT penetration and social inequalities, then, is more complex than the Arab Spring would suggest. The difference with the Arab Spring is that the people united to take down one leader, whereas daily life features far more social classes and political opinions, halting social change, or at least considerably slowing it down. While technology helped bring social justice to entire nations, it did not eliminate social classes within the nations.
In order to decrease social inequalities in ICT usage, then, ICT designers and national policymakers should consider stipulations to favor usage of their technology by marginalized social classes.

Whether it be reducing costs to allow poorer classes to buy the product or developing voice recognition technology to engage the illiterate, extra effort will be needed to reduce the social inequality of ICT usage. Preliminary efforts by USAID’s Women in Development initiative show promise; other agencies should mimic their efforts to increase ICT usage among digital minority populations. Without these extra efforts to assist marginalized populations, ICTs will only further embed developing nations with social and economic inequalities, leading to future instability and lower quality of life.

You already know that Facebook is driving ICT adoption across Africa, and that its African user base is doubling every 7 months. Now Facebook added a new mobile application that is going to blow away all other social connectors in the developing world - Facebook on Every Phone app:

Today, we're launching the new Facebook for Every Phone app, which offers a fast and comprehensive Facebook experience on over 2,500 different phones. This app not only includes Facebook’s most popular features, such as News Feed, Inbox, and Photos, but also enables you to upload photos and find friends from your phone’s contacts.  People all over the world can download the app by visiting m.facebook.com and scrolling down to the download link, or by entering d.facebook.com/install directly into their mobile browser. You can also find it in leading app stores, including GetJar, Appia, and Mobile Weaver.

Optimized to sip data, this application is specifically targeted at the developing world. Facebook sees trends like 99% of Kenyans going online via mobile phones and is expanding its reach beyond smartphones to the wananchi with this app.

Soon, I predict that this Facebook app will be the most common application on African mobile phones, and Facebook will be the Internet for most Africans (if its not already).