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Sierra Leone: One Percent of Population Own PCs
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Concord Times (Freetown)
23 July 2008
Posted to the web 23 July 2008
Olusegun Ogundeji
According to the Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire (CWIQ) survey undertaken from 5 April to 10 May 2007 but released recently by Statistics Sierra Leone, which co-ordinates the national statistical system, 1.1% of Sierra Leoneans have personal computers.
Abdul Fatta Ahmed, managing director of Union System (SL), an IT consultancy firm which also runs an internet cafe, thinks the figure is true after calculating the number of Sierra Leoneans involved in proportion to their earning power.
"That's about 66,000 Sierra Leoneans. It can be true because of the cost of acquiring computer and its accessories these days," he said. "The earning power of many Sierra Leoneans is very poor and computer literacy is very low." The survey, which is an embodiment of results of data collection and its analysis and indicators of social welfare called core welfare indicators, stated that a total of 7,797 households were successfully enumerated from a sample of 7,800 households giving the survey coverage rate of 99.96 percent.
A sample size of 7,800 households, covering rural and urban areas, in all nineteen Local Councils of the four administrative regions of the country was selected from a total of 520 enumeration areas.
Austin Odia, an IT consultant too, believes the figure is correct and added that there could be a rapid change soon as the imposition of zero duty on computers gets into full implementation.
It would be recalled that the Parliament early this month passed the Finance Act 2008, a bill that provides for the effective elimination of duty on computer imports.
Though the bill is geared towards broadening the government's revenue base, the finance ministry decided to remove the duty on computers to help make them accessible to people in every part of Sierra Leone, including remote areas Technical director at FGC Wireless, Ali Ajao, said the move for a zero duty on computers "will reduce the price of computers and components. But the reduction may not be immediate." The high cost of computers has been blamed for the widening digital gap in the country, and computer dealers claim that high custom duties are responsible for the high prices of PCs and accessories.
For a way forward, Fatta Ahmed stressed that though the economy is very bad, there is the need to intensify the level of people's computer education because "computer is now part of knowledge." "Gaining access to information on the internet is also very expensive. Imagine we pay about Le 885,000 every month at our (internet) café for eight computers. Some other ISPs like Comium charge $50. So we have to charge users based on that," he said.
Government officials too, of late, are pushing for more ICT courses in the country's public education curriculum.
Godwin B. Samba, public relations officer of the Ministry of Education, Youths and Sports, last month said: "ICT must be embedded in the curriculum at all educational levels. This is not an ICT generation, but it is the hope of the future. Investment in the ICT industry is very critical to the development of a post-conflict country like Sierra Leone." It was revealed in a recent survey that only 2% of university students are computer-literate. At Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College (FBC), the oldest tertiary institution in West Africa, one student said an Internet room of about 20 computers is simply not effective for a student body of more than 15,000.
Computer studies are included in FBC's tuition fee, but few students enroll in computer classes. Samba said that until the government makes it a policy, the ICT culture will not be sustained in Sierra Leone.
"We need to make it part of our learning process, because it is not part of the African psyche," he said. "Some of us are even apprehensive about using some of these gadgets, but once the political will is there, people will get used to it all by themselves, even without being taught." Samba explained that though many educational ICT projects exist, they lack needed sponsorship.
A call for the creation of an ICT centre was also raised by Austin Odia who trained more than 600 ex-combatants between 2000 and 2003 in Freetown and Makeni on computer basics during the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programme before he ventured into full-time consultancy services.
As a developing nation, he said, Sierra Leone needs an ICT resource center that would provide information knowledge.
"The center would help to demystify the mystic behind ICT and help in the development of IT culture in the country," he said.
Other ownership of selected household items investigated, as contained in the CWIQ survey completed in November, showed that 26.4% of the over six million populations have mobile phones; 12.1% have televisions; 11.6% have VCR/DVD; and 1.2% can boast of land lines.
The CWIQ survey is meant to collect information to monitor poverty and the effects of development policies, programmes and projects on the welfare situations of the population.
Financial assistance for the CWIQ pilot and main surveys was provided by the Department for International Development (DFID) while the World Bank provided technical assistance for the successful completion of both surveys.
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Two consultants, Mr. Yaw Antwi-Adjei (Data Processing) and Mr. Enock F. Ching'anda (survey statistician) worked with the staff of Statistics Sierra Leone to complete the CWIQ survey. Mr. James Otto, World Bank Data Processing Consultant joined the team and assisted in processing the CWIQ pilot and main survey data.
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