Overview of the Use of ICT and the Digital Divide in Sudan

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the use of ICT and the digital divide in Sudan and highlights the need for bridging the digital divide to enhance equality in the use of ICT in Sudan. Our findings are consistent with the findings in the international literature on the incidence and the main reasons for the incidence of the digital divide. We provide significant contribution and fill the gap in the Sudanese literature, a novel element in our analysis is that different from the Sudanese literature we use recent secondary data at the macro level to discuss the use of ICT and the incidence of the digital divide in Sudan and we provide a more comprehensive analysis by investigating and comparing the digital divide for different modes of ICT in Sudan. Our results confirm the seventh hypothesis in Chap. 1 about the relationship between the uses of ICT (mobile, computer and Internet) and the occurrence of the digital divide for households and individuals in terms of ownership, use, spending, awareness and knowledge and purposes of uses of mobile, computer and Internet defined by region (geographic location), mode of living, gender, age and educational level in Sudan. Our results imply that the observed disparities in the use of ICT and digital divide implies that ICT adds a new dimension to the already existing and longstanding challenges of inequalities and disparities in Sudan that has been well-documented in the literature as we explained in Chap. 2 . We find that the major impediment factors that hindered the use of computer at home and the use of Internet are the lack of electricity that hindered the use of computer and the non availability of the Internet service that hindered the use of the Internet in rural areas nearly twice higher than in urban areas. We find that home is the most commonly place for using the Internet, Arabic is the most widely used language for using the Internet and mobile cellular telephone is the most widely used mean or for using the Internet. The use of mobile cellular telephone is more than 14 times higher than fixed telephone. We find positive relationship between the use of computer and Internet and educational level, and negative relationship between the use of computer, Internet and mobile and age. Our findings imply inconclusive relationships between the use of mobile and educational level and between the use of computer, mobile and Internet and professional levels. We find positive correlations between the use of ICT and net enrolment rate in primary education, literacy rate, per capita income and rate of urbanization and negative correlation between the use of ICT and poverty gap ratio. Our results in this chapter confirms the seventh hypothesis in Chap. 1 about the relationship between the use of ICT and the incidence of the digital divide defined by age and educational level in Sudan. Our results are plausible and consistent with the findings in the literature that imply positive relationship between the uses of ICT and educational level, that particularly important for computer, since computer may require substantial levels of education for use, but telephones and the Internet may require very little.