Asia Leads in Internet Use

According to Internet World Stat website, Asia leads in the world with One Billion people using internet. That is one sixth of the world population followed by Europe, 500 million people.

Africa is fifth after Latin America with 110 million people using internet services. When you come into penetration, North America is leading.

Although there has been a growth in internet users, Africa stands with 5.7 percent compared to 94.3 percent in the world. Africa has 118 million internet users the growth of five times bigger since 2006 from 22 million users.

Africa’s top internet countries per 2011 statistics are Nigeria followed by Egypt. In East Africa Kenya takes the lead with 44 percent, Tanzania without being mentioned.

Since 2007 the biggest growth of internet users has taken place in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and lately Rwanda. The number of users has more than doubled within a year. The reason why Tanzania is lagging behind is language breakdown to use the internet effectively.

Although English is officially used, Swahili still dominates and is a mother tongue in Tanzania. Google website has been translated into Kiswahili but most citizens cannot afford to use it due to computer illiteracy.

Computer literacy is being taught in schools but there is no access of computers and skilled teachers to train. Most of the teaching is done in theory with no practice.

With this digital divide, is Tanzania ready for Digital Migration by 2015?

This was revealed today at the training when the trainer took participants through different websites journalists can use to find information relevant to their topics.  

My First Day From P.O. Box to Dot Com

Most people especially the young refer to people of my age as P.O. Box, meaning people of nostalgia. But today here I am to unvail that description. The word dot com is commonly used because of the advanced information technology world wide.

When this training started and looked around me, the room was packed with journalists of Kizazi Kipya. And believe you me, at first I felt out of place, but no I wasn't. Then it came into my mind, "will I be able to catch up with this young blood?" Time for introduction, the dot coms went, it was now my round...!" "I start,... they call me.....P.O. Box, mzururo street nowhere......", laughter.  I gathered my strengths until finished the introduction.

I started to SWOT analyse myself. Strenghts, yes I have because am computer literate. At least I can use the computer to communicate with others. Weakness, well, everybody has his/her weaknesses. What about Opportunity....wow...the training is the opportunity to bridge the gap between the P. O. Box and dot com. Threats that I have is the speed to up catch up with dot com.

The opportunity can be used to strengthen my capacity- the trainer who is also a radio practitioner like myself and the training to be offered by him. He tried to best of his knowledge to remove my fears in order to meet my expectations of the training. This is the internet training bringing together editors, lecturers, senior journalists and others.

It is a small group of 11 people with brains, but we interract, participate and mostly share jokes and laughter! The question was thrown to me by the trainer who is of Finnish origin called Peik Johannson. "P.O. Box, tell the participants how did you use to distribute pre recorded radio programmes?" I replied, by post,.. ? The dot coms laughed. Enough testimony of P.O. Box adjective. The session went by and there I was with my dot coms in day one of the training. It is the rising sun.

With the articulation and well blended training programme, after five days, my name will change. It will change because apart from the literacy that I do have, will be able to effectively make use of internet in modern journalism for fact finding, news monitoring, communication and publication with the purpose of creating balanced and critical high quality journalism for media.

Age ain't nothing but a number! I am moving to dot com right from day one! Thanks to MISA TAN for organizing this workshop in collaboration with Vikes through Finnish Foreign Ministry.