A Rural-Urban Digital Divide? Regional Aspects Of Internet Use In Tanzania

Presented at the 9th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, this 14-page document looks at the digital divide within Tanzania. Based on a survey among Tanzanian internet café users in rural, semi-urban, and central regions of the country, authors find that the divide is mainly a question of finding venues with technology to access the internet. The internet users and usage at the different sites are more uniform than anticipated, with, however, a few significant differences.

The authors point to an increase in numbers of internet users in Tanzania from 60,000 to 333,000, or by 455%, in the period 2000-2005. The number of internet hosts, meanwhile, increased by 300%, while 9 companies are licensed to provide services and bandwidth. According to policy documents used as sources for this research, privately owned internet cafés are the main access for internet use and increasingly represent opportunities for ordinary people in economically poor areas to access the internet. As stated here, there are few telecentres in Tanzania; thus, they are excluded from the study.

According to the literature on the digital divide, impediments may be divided into:

1. infrastructural - physical access to information and communication technology (ICT) resources and to the internet;
2. socio-economic - financial, educational, and geographical conditions;
3. demographic - dimensions, like age, gender, marital status, and ethnicity; and
4. cultural - elements like
   motivation, attitudes, and religion.

In seeking to understand the nature of this divide in Tanzania, the authors surveyed cafe owners and users in three regions of the country, studying internet cafes in rural towns and in semi-urban and urban areas.

Findings showed a very clear geographical digital divide between urban and rural areas in terms of
public internet access points. For example, there are 16 times more people per internet café in the rural regions than in urban Dar es Salaam due to the scarcity of cafes in rural areas. However, the study found that use and users of the cafés were otherwise remarkably uniform, "which, to some degree, questions the described socio-economic or demographic aspects of the digital divide between urban and rural parts of a developing country. Out of ten investigated variables, only three (gender, age and total monthly
expenditure) significantly differ across levels of [statistical] centrality."


Differences upon which the authors chose to comment are:

• The semi-urban users are youngest, and the
  rural users are younger than the urban users.
• Young people, and, in particular, students
  represent a main,user group in rural areas.
• A high portion of governmental employees among the rural users confirms that the level of automation (in the governmental
  sector) is low and is exacerbated by shortages of skills, equipment, and money.
• While the female share of the internet café users is close to 40% in the urban areas, it is only
  25% in rural areas, indicating that there is a "gender digital divide".
• The users' financial status, represented by their own stated monthly expenditure, shows a
  significant difference between the rural and the urban/semi-urban regions. The rural users have only one third of the purchasing power compared to the two other groups. However, they spend almost the same amount of money on internet café fees as urban users.

Similarities of use in the various cafes include the fact that, whether urban or rural, the users' educational level is similar, and there are only slight differences in purpose of use. Email and chatting are ranked higher in the urban and semi-urban regions, while information searching activities information seeking, research, and reading news) are the most popular rural activities.


The authors conclude that "the digital divide within a developing country like Tanzania is first and foremost a question of differences in the possibility of access to the Internet and ICT in rural and urban areas. It is mainly a technological divide, but the problems, when it comes to bridging this divide, seem to be a combination of political and financial obstacles. Our policy recommendation is therefore to make the conditions favourable for entrepreneurs and organisations to set up public Internet access points, and to give people in rural and geographical distant regions the same necessary qualifications to utilise the Internet for their own human development, and thus bridge the divide."