Johannesburg – South Africa has been rated as the country with the highest digital literacy in Africa, according to a report released on Thursday by Siemens and Deloitte.
The ‘African Digitalisation Maturity Report 2017’ included research conducted across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia.
The skills and digital literacy segment of the study took into account the extent and quality of a country’s human resources and current use of digital technology and platforms.
In the digital maturity assessment, SA scored higher than all other countries across all segments of the survey.
“South Africa scores above the four-country average in all areas except for digital training (internet access in schools),” a statement about SA in the research said.
“South Africa’s score is very close to the international benchmark in the area of access and use. This is largely because of very good mobile network access. The South African population has 100% mobile network coverage and 93% have 3G coverage,” it went further to read.
The data for the individual indicators were sourced from surveys and publications produced by international organisations and firms such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Economic Outlook, October 2016, World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Information Technology Report and Facebook penetration rate.
The research also assessed the readiness of the four countries to capitalise on digitaliation rating economic maturity focusing on a country’s size, growth and sophistication of the economy.
The study further took into account the extent to which the business, legal and regulatory environments was conducive to digitalisation, as well as infrastructure.
According recent insights by the International Data Corporation (IDC), SA was forecast to have the highest information, technology and communications (ICT) spend across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) regions in 2017.
South Africa is expected to lead the way among the regions with a $10.5bn spend in 2017 as technologies such as cloud, big data, social, and mobility become investment imperatives and dominate the ICT decision-making agenda.
