Social Learning through Social Networks and Technological Appropriation: The Role of Peer Effects in the Adoption and Use of the Internet in Cameroonian Tontines

Abstract

This article attempts to verify whether tontines constitute a social learning platform for the appropriation of technology that underlies patterns of adoption and use of the Internet in sub-Saharan Africa. It uses for this purpose a survey of 2650 households in the cities of Douala, Buea and Limbe and employs initially two zero-inflated count data models to highlight the Intensity of the practice of tontines and after, simple probit models to detect the presence of favorable peer effects in the association tontines on the likelihood of adoption and use of the Internet in Cameroonian households. The results show that, while in ROSCA-type tontines social learning is uncertain because of neutral peer effects, in association tontines within socio-professional groups peer effects are positive and reinforce the process of adoption. These results confirm the studies on dissocializing Internet carried in United States and Europe at the beginning of the dynamics of its diffusion. However and more important, the results presented here show that peer effects play positively on social learning and technology appropriation that underlie the adoption and use of the Internet not in tontine of ROSCA-type, but in the tontine envisaged in professional groups according to their propensity to use modern values for jobs.