ICT Development Index: Zimbabwe moves four places up

Yesterday, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) released the latest global ICT pricing and penetration data report. You can find the report here. A key feature of the report is the ICT Development Index (IDI), which ranks 152 countries according to their level of ICT access, use and skills, and compares 2008 and 2010 scores.

According to the report Zimbabwe has moved four places up from a ranking of 128 in 2008 to 124 in 2010. The actual IDI value for Zimbabwe was 1.81 in 2010, up to from 1.49 in 2008.

While Africa remains the region with the lowest IDI values, the values for all Africa countries increased between 2008 and 2010. Mauritius and Kenya recorded the highest IDI value increase in the period, and Zimbabwe, Angola and Senegal all moved four places up in the IDI rankings. Mauritius is ranked 69 globally and has an IDI value of 4.00. Kenya is ranked 115 and has an IDI value of 2.29.

Zimbabwe is also one of the countries in Africa that has increased its mobile penetration rate by more than 30%. The other countries are Rwanda Senegal and Tanzania. In 2010 Zimbabwe’s mobile penetration had jumped to 60% from just 13% in 2008.

As a result of the jump in mobile penetration the report notes that globally, Zimbabwe is in the top ten economies with the greatest 2008-2010 change in the IDI access sub-index. The IDI access sub-index also measures the fixed telephone penetration, the international Internet bandwidth per Internet user, proportion of households with a computer, and proportion of households with internet access at home.

Overall, most countries at the top of the IDI ranking are from Europe and Asia Pacific.

We’ve summarized Zimbabwe’s ICT development indicators that contribute to the overall IDI value. Kenya registered the highest increase in IDI value on the continent so we’ve included it here for convenient comparison.

There report shows a lot of other information that we can’t possibly exhaust here. We encourage you to download it if you have some hunger for the information.