Africa lags behind the share of the global digital economy as it concentrated in the hands of few individuals and dominated by US and China which account for 90 per cent of market capitalization of the value of the world’s 70 largest digital platforms.
According to the study revealed by UNCTAD, Kenya is among four African countries where digital entrepreneurship is concentrated.
Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa account for 60 per cent of Africa’s digital entrepreneurship.
Ghana, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda and Tanzania have been clustered in the second-tier accounting for 20 per cent of the continent’s digital entrepreneurship.
Significant digital entrepreneurship activity began earlier in Accra, Cape Town, Nairobi and Lagos, Kigali, however, more and more diverse enterprises exist in those first four cities than in second-tier cities, and the density of innovation hubs and other support initiatives is also higher there,” reads the report.
The report also warns least developing countries risk becoming mere providers of raw data, while having to pay for the digital intelligence generated using their data.
The report forecasts an increase in Global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic to 150,700 gigabytes per second by 2022 from 46,600 gigabytes per second in 2017.
“Global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, a proxy for data flows, has grown dramatically in the past two decades. In 1992, global Internet networks carried approximately 100 gigabytes (GB) of traffic per day,” the report indicates
Fifty per cent of global spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) is also concentrated in the two leading global economies where 75 per cent of all patents related to block chain technologies and a similar percentage of the cloud computing market are concentrated.
Seven super platforms, such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Ten cent and Alibaba account for two thirds of the total market value of the top 70 percent of the platform.
The combined value of the platform companies with a market capitalization of more than 100 million USD was estimated at more than 7 trillion USD in 2017, 67 percent higher than in 2015, according to the report.
It is recommended that Least Developing Countries attempt to support local technological entrepreneurs.