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What could internet adoption in Africa mean for international security?
7 June 2022
I know very little about Africa. I don't know How to Write About Africa. But this data says interesting things about international security, so I'll do my best to avoid the cliches and focus on security implications for the U.S. and its allies.
The World Bank maintains a collection of regional- and country-level statistics it calls the World Development Indicators (WDI). This database includes not only the standard economic and demographic statistics such as GDP per capita and population, but also data as obscure as the numbers of threatened bird species and landline phone subscriptions.
I used the WDI to examine indicators of technology adoption. One trend stood out: African populations are quickly coming online. I discuss what this looks like, what could be driving it, and what it could mean for intelligence collection and transnational crime.
Wasn't African internet adoption inevitable?
Yes, but we often forget that the internet is a physical technology. It relies on infrastructure that requires both investment and expertise. Only once that infrastructure has been developed in a country can people connect and a digital economy emerge.
Governments typically lead the development of internet infrastructure, both because of the capital it requires and the public good it provides. But high capital costs aren't the only thing that hold them back. Governments drag their feet while deciding what they want the internet to look like in their country. Iginio Gagliardone of the University of Witwatersrand discusses this in his 2019 book China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet. In it, he contrasts internet governance in Kenya, which employs something similar to the West's open and decentralized model, with internet governance in Zimbabwe, which uses built-in content moderation (censorship) controls.
But even with the difficulty of defining an internet governance model and building internet infrastructure, no one thought the internet would never come to Africa. Internet access increases with wealth, which you can see in my Hans Rosling-style graph below.
The takeaway is that even though African internet access remains comparatively low, wealth has been steadily climbing. Combining these wealth increases with decreasing costs of electronics, increasing foreign investment in Africa, and a migration of services online, and more African countries should be plugging in.
Maybe not to this extent though.
The WDI confirm internet access is increasing across Africa. What is surprising is the speed at which African countries are coming online. Northern Africa has seen the fastest growth, but even in the regions with the slowest uptake, the rate of adoption has increased by more than 300% over the past decade.
Before we get to why this is happening, let's look at the how.
Mobile phone subscriptions drive adoption.
Most African populations connect via mobile phones, at rates much higher than much of the world (Russia and Thailand lead with 1.6 mobile subscriptions per person in 2020—explore that on my tech adoption dashboard).
At the same time, broadband use, which we can understand as a competing service, is low. This is likely because broadband service requires substantially more infrastructure than mobile networks. We can see in the third graph above (secure servers per million people) that more infrastructure came online in 2016. But those numbers suggest Africa still lags behind most of the world. So with governments and businesses slow to invest, people connect on their cell phone instead.
Why the boom in internet users? Demographics play a part.
Looking again at the WDI, Africa also stands out for the scale of its demographic shifts. Urbanization is behind the rest of the world but increasing. Internet access is one of many amenities that attract people to cities, and we can expect the proportion of individuals accessing the internet regularly to rise with urbanization.
More significantly, the population of Africa is growing faster than that of any other continent. While the map below shows Africa's high population growth rates in 2019, the continent's high rate has been consistent since the 1990s. This is likely a major driver behind the continent’s increasing internet usage. Younger populations are more eager adopters of technology, and their demand for digital services is likely the reason we have seen their supply in Africa increase.
Infrastructure gaps remain. How they are filled will impact U.S. intelligence collection.
The construction of new internet infrastructure has major implications for the United States and its allies. Currently, those countries dominate the infrastructure that supports the internet. Together they control not only the overwhelming majority of total servers, but also those Tier 1 internet service providers that make up the internet “backbone.” This has huge implications for signals intelligence and Western governments’ ability to surveil international communications that are often routed through U.S. servers.
This technological hegemony is uncertain going forward. African governments will continue to build internet infrastructure. We already see China, acting through Huawei and ZTE, rush to provide it. The U.S. should not cede this space.
The landscape of transnational crime will also change.
While the growth of African internet access is undoubtedly a positive development, it will also bring an increase in transnational crime. As Olatuji Olaigbe points out in an excellent article for The Record, cybercrime is on the rise in West Africa, both in terms of volume and sophistication. This is in part due to the internet’s ability to connect criminals to a global pool of victims.
More than that, the reality is that cybercrime is an attractive option for people with comparatively few economic opportunities. The barrier to entry can be very low, both in expertise and investment. Victims are no longer members of your community, but wealthy foreigners a world away. Law enforcement always struggles to attribute cyberattacks, so you can likely remain anonymous. And even if you are identified, extradition treaties (or their absence) afford you a measure of protection.
To date, the U.S. and its allies have been effective in working with African countries to apprehend and extradite African cyber criminals. But it’s unclear if this success will continue as we see connectivity, and the scale of crime, increase. Some African states rank low on measures of accountability and transparency, and high in fragility. How they respond to increased internet access, and the transnational crime it brings, is another issue to watch.
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