Background: It is widely agreed that for all intents and purposes, the Industrial Revolution is over and Africa missed out on this revolution. The developed world has now embraced the so-called Information Revolution. Many countries have come up with focused strategies to move their people into the Information (and Knowledge) Society I (K) S. The belief is that knowledge is power. In fact, there is widespread talk of the 'information haves' and the 'information not-haves'. This is sometimes code-named the 'digital divide'. Just like the North-South divide of the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution seems to emerge with similar characteristics. The rich developed countries have all it takes to create an Information society for their people, while the poor developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa seem to be, once again, the last in the race to transform their societies to embrace this new revolution. Yet, unlike the industrial Revolution, it is widely believed that this time round, if poor countries do the necessary groundwork, they can leapfrog and catapult their people right into the Information Age. They only need to come up with the right strategies (commonly known as e-strategies), create the right enabling environment, which can for example, attract foreign direct investment, and facilitate the training of human capacity.

In implementing the above-mentioned strategies, regardless whether nations are poor or rich, there is need for countries to have in place mechanisms for measuring how they are succeeding in achieving the visions, missions, goals and objectives stipulated in those strategies. In view of this, major international bodies are working towards forming consensus on the development of indicators for measuring the IS.

On the international arena, the two-phased World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) has been the biggest wake-up call ever for countries to work hard to ensure that they do the right things that can bring about their transformation into the IS. The first phase in Geneva came up with two outputs, namely, the Declaration of Principles www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html and the Plan of Action ww.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/poa.html. The latter underscored the need to put in place a basis for the collection and analysis of data, and promotion of internationally comparable statistics.

In fact, Paragraphs 44, 45 and 46 of Chapter 4 of this document (The Way Forward) respectively:

o Call for the development of effective international performance evaluation and benchmarking framework;

o Welcome the launching of the Partnership on Measuring Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Development;

o Invite all countries to establish information gathering mechanisms at the national level with the involvement of all stakeholders

 

o Invite all countries to establish information gathering mechanisms at the national level with the involvement of all stakeholders

In response to this call a lot of activity has taken place throughout the World targeted at coming up with the right ICT indicators to measure the IS.

 

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