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Internet Use in Ghana

The Internet Environment
The web is not a widely used information and communication tool in Ghana, though this may well evolve in coming years as new offshore cables provide African countries with better access to the global web, and mobile telephone networks are better able to support web applications.

Table 1
           

Frequent Internet Users
As things stood in mid-2009 when the survey was conducted, only fifteen percent of respondents said they had been online for any purpose in the last year, and less than half of those (7 percent) said they had logged on in the last week.

While a lack of telecommunications infrastructure surely impedes internet access for many in Ghana, another major challenge appears to be lack of knowledge about the web (Table 1). Over half of those who said they do not use the internet affirmed they do not know how to use it; 35 percent (representing about 30 percent of all adult Ghanaians) said they did not know what the internet is.

These figures may simply reflect the absence of the internet in many locations, which would of course make it difficult for people to learn about it. However, more intriguing is that about a fifth of non-users cited the difficulty of finding a place to access the web as an impediment to use, suggesting that quite a few potential users want to use the internet but they do not have ready access to a connection, either inside or outside their homes. 

Table 2
           

The profile of frequent internet users (based on respondents who had used the internet in the previous week) is quite distinct from that of the overall population (Table 2). As things stand now, development communication efforts pursued through the internet are most likely to reach young men in Accra and other urban areas who are highly educated and relatively wealthy. Again, the ability to read English with ease comes to the fore.

Internet Use Patterns
Of those who said they have used the internet, fewer than half said they go online for more than the most basic purposes (email, checking news, and search) on a regular basis (Chart 1). Social networking and getting information from government websites—activities with potential impact for citizens’ involvement in the political or development process—were weekly habits for less than a third of internet users, representing less than 4 percent of the total adult population.

Chart 1
  

Low levels of exposure to the internet make it difficult to gauge public opinion of the medium as a reliable source of information. Even among those who responded to the question on trustworthiness of web-based news and information, many simply answered “do not know” (Chart 2).