It may be common fact that Africa is currently receiving the most attention in regards to Internet and communications development. Attention can be gauged in many ways: investment dollars, number of organizations, or even by bandwidth. Curious to see how well-represented individual African nations are in the ICT progress game, I, however, turned to Google News for a quick analysis. Although such a medium is not an exact science and potential flaws exist (they are discussed below), the results can still point to useful general trends.

In this case, the presence of a newsworthy story means: 1) domestic excitement 2) international attention 3) progress. Searches were performed for three different categories: Africa, World, and Continent. The goal is both to see how African ICT development compares to the world and to see which African nations lag in current online ICT exposure. Here are the results after performing a simple search for ‘[country name] ict’  in the time period of ‘recent news’ which is approximately the past 3 weeks.

Africa, by country, in descending order:

Country	Recent Google News Articles
Nigeria	142
South Africa	113
Kenya	89
Uganda	84
Ghana	83
Egypt	62
Rwanda	45
Tanzania	41
Tunisia	37
Swaziland	31
Botswana	30
Central African Republic	27
Zimbabwe	27
Zambia	25
Mauritius	24
Sudan	23
Congo	22
Burkina Faso	21
Mozambique	20
Namibia	20
Burundi	19
Morocco	19
Senegal	16
Chad	15
Dem. Rep. of Congo	15
Gabon	15
Guinea	15
Algeria	14
Niger	14
Cameroon	13
Malawi	12
Ethiopia	11
Madagascar	11
Benin	10
Equatorial Guinea	10
Angola	8
Liberia	8
Libya	8
Sao Tome And Principe	8
Cote D’Ivoire	7
Mali	7
Sierra Leone	7
Lesotho	6
Somalia	6
Gambia	5
Seychelles	5
Mauritania	4
Djibouti	3
Togo	2
Comoros	1
Eritrea	1
Ascension Island	0
Cape Verde	0
Guinea-Bissau	0
Mayotte	0
Reunion	0
St.Helena	0
Western Sahara	0

Summary:

• Nigeria has the most news stories, but also has the greatest population
• South Africa, as expected, is at the top, as are Kenya, Ghana, and Egypt
• East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania) is receiving great attention, possible a residual from Seacom’s launch
• Apart from island nations, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Togo and Djibouti have low news volume
• Guinea-Bissau has no news articles indexed in Google News mentioning ICT in the past 3 weeks, and Eritrea has only 1

Notable world nations, in alphabetical order:

Country	Recent Google News Stories
United States	157
Australia	232
Canada	109
China	305
France	112
Germany	109
India	358
Japan	154
Russia	62
United Kingdom	556

Summary:

• Nigeria & South Africa > Canada, France, Germany, Russia
• Africa has a relatively large number of ICT news stories per capita (remember India and China’s individual populations are roughly that of the entire African continent)

Continents, in descending order:

Continent	Recent News
Africa	476
Europes	341
Asia	338
North America	85
South America	30

Summary:

• As expected, Africa is currently receiving the most ICT attention
• The term ‘ICT’ seems much less common in the Americas

Notes on potential error:

• Perhaps not all regions of the world use the term ‘ICT’ thus skewing the data.
• Purely regional articles that don’t mention specific country names would not be included in this set.
• There’s a chance that local news outlets are not aggregated by Google News.
• Population data has not been integrated to normalize the data, but it really isn’t necessary. The trend, when combined with common knowledge of approximate populations, is clear.