Assessment of Information Communication Technologies and Poverty Reduction in West Africa

Abstract

The Millennium Declaration set 2015 as the target date for having the number of people living in extreme poverty. Exceptional progress in some developing countries makes achieving that goal globally a realistic possibility. However, many countries will fall for short, and up to 1 billion people are likely to remain destitute by the target date. What role is Information Communication Technologies (ICT) playing in this regard? This paper seeks to answer this question by look for shared characteristics of sixteen developing countries in the West African axis. These countries were compared using indicators of their macroeconomics characteristics and especially, their ICT economic characteristics. The countries chosen for analysis constitute a highly diverse mix. The group includes some poor and some rich in the region. From assessment, they differ greatly in their systems of governance and economic management. Yet, they posted some sterling statistics, not only in reducing poverty, but across the broad range of macroeconomic and ICT economic performance measures used to compare them. Research discoveries from time-series, cross-section regression analysis reveal that while economic growth generally was an important contributor to poverty reduction, the ICT sector mattered substantially, with growth in ICT-oriented, ICT-intensive and ICT-Allied enterprise incomes being especially important.