Level of poverty has remained very high in Africa in the past, and also the present. The 2006 report on the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) states that 44% of Africans live on less than US$ 1 a day. However, the same MDG report details the dramatic advances achieved in other world regions during recent decades. For many rural or poor Africans, however, using a computer or even a telephone remains a dream. Akossi Akossi, Secretary General of the African Telecommunications Union, describes the lack of ICT infrastructure throughout the continent as “cruel.”
High costs plus the shortage of investment capital have limited the construction of the right kind of infrastructure in Africa, whether it be the fibre optic and microwave “backbones” that link the country with national and international transmission capacity (bandwidth), or the fixed wire and wireless networks that link the end users
