A comparative study of the readiness of developing nations for the networked world: West Africa versus newly wired developing countries

With the world in the midst of an information revolution, governments of developing countries, which were mostly left behind during the industrial era, are beginning to realize that countries that fail to get their infrastructures and knowledge base ready for the emerging networked world risk falling further behind economically and socially. This study aimed to contribute to the solutions of two problems in particular that emerged in the literature: (a) lack of e-readiness assessments on the majority of countries in the developing world, especially poor countries, who perhaps need them the most; (b) lack of empirical information on the factors that accelerate e-readiness advancement of nations, especially the developing nations. Specifically, this study: (a) examined the readiness of West Africa for participation in the networked world; (b) compared their recent progress in information and communications technology (ICT) development and human capacity building with those of a group of randomly selected newly wired developing countries (NWCs) to determine if West Africa was making a comparable effort toward becoming e-ready; and (c) identified some of the factors that are related to e-readiness advancement of developing nations. The comparative analysis of 13 West African countries and 13 NWCs show that West Africa (growing at an annual rate of 3.0%) advanced at a statistically comparable pace as the NWC group (growing at an annual rate of 4.9%) during the 1995–2000 period. The results of the correlational analyses (conducted using a sample of 57 developing countries) suggest that different factors contribute to e-readiness advancement of countries at different levels of economic development.