Twitter in Africa

Last week I concluded that there were Twitter users in all European countries, with the exception of three mini-states (Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City).

The picture for Africa is somewhat different. The map below contains quite some white spots.


The penetration of ICT infrastructure and the internet in Africa is far below what it is common in the Western world. With 14 percent of the world’s population Africa still has only 0.3 percent of global actvity in the internet. The average number of hosts per 1000 inhabitants for Africa is 1.74, where the world average density is 33 hosts per 1000 habitants (Source of data).

An additional reason to explain the extreme low number of Twitter users in Africa is the fact that in the former French colonies French is used as official language. In these countries knowledge of English may not be of a sufficient nature to stimulate the few internet users to use Twitter's website only available with an English interface.

The country with the highest Twitter penetration is South Africa, followed by Egypt. Ironically, I found also Twitter accounts in Sudan and Zimbabwe, two of the poorest and worst led countries in Africa. I was unable to find Twitter accounts in a lot of African countries, more precisely : Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Togo and Zambia.