Measuring Community Access

Access to information and communication technologies (ICT) is a critical topic, particularly in the on-going global discussion on how to bring the benefits of the information society to everyone.

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has provided a fresh impetus for international efforts to bridge the digital divide. The first phase of WSIS, held in Geneva in 2003, produced a Declaration of Principles and a Plan of Action that recognize that ICT infrastructure is crucial in achieving the goal of digital inclusion. The United Nations Millennium Declaration also acknowledges ICT as an important tool to achieve the overall Millennium Development Goals. But how do we measure the true extent of access to ICT and to the information society?

Identifying the right indicators to collect meaningful data is crucial to clarify the real magnitude of the digital divide in both its domestic and international dimensions. One aspect of access to ICT that has rarely received due attention is community access. The growing number of people, particularly in the developing world, who access ICT at public facilities, calls for the development of appropriate indicators to reflect this reality.

Why community access matters

As the world’s primary source of global, impartial ICT/telecommunication statistics, ITU has a clear mandate to develop community access indicators.

It has been widely acknowledged that traditional indicators alone — such as the number of fixed telephone lines — are not sufficient to identify the extent of the digital divide. Nor can they tell the entire truth about the potential of digital opportunities.

Household penetration rates, for example, are likely to be much lower in the developing world, since the vast majority of homes in developing countries do not have modern ICT facilities such as computers and the Internet. But since only few countries — and mainly the most industrialized ones — have carried out Internet user surveys, it is difficult to determine the exact number of public Internet users worldwide.

Current data suggest that community access is playing an important role in providing the citizens of most developing countries with access to ICT — a prerequisite for participating in the information society and reaping its benefits.

Even in so-called middle-income economies, over one-third of all those online use public Internet facilities. While developed countries tend to have lower public Internet facility access rates (in Canada, only 1.2 per cent of Canadian households report that a member uses the Internet from an Internet café), some have used public facilities to spread the Internet to areas that are difficult to connect. In Spain, for example, "red.es", a public business agency associated with the country’s Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, is delivering free and high-speed Internet access to thousands of public users located in rural areas of the country that are bereft of broadband access. The project is expected to benefit over 1.3 million citizens in the coming years.

A lack of community access indicators and data

To assess the current status of community access indicators, earlier this year ITU sent a questionnaire to all telecommunication/ICT regulators, ministries and national statistical offices. While some 80 countries responded to the questionnaire, around half noted that no data were available. What’s more, the data provided by the remaining countries were often incomplete, and showed several inconsistencies. This suggests that while a number of countries have realized the importance of community access, there is still a lack of harmonized indicators that can be compared on a global scale. The collection process also shows a lack of cooperation in some countries between the different agencies dealing with ICT and statistics. Only very few countries have actually started to collect information on public Internet access centres (PIAC) as defined in the questionnaire (see Figure 2). And where national initiatives and projects to monitor and track community access exist, these are usually guided by specific geographic, societal and economic characteristics and are often not internationally comparable.

How to measure community access?

There are different ways of measuring community access - for example, through the inclusion of a specific question in an Internet user survey. This would provide basic information on the number/or percentage of people using public Internet facilities. Some countries, such as those of the European Union, have started collecting data on the number of public Internet access points. But one major limitation with this indicator is that it does not show the distribution of facilities. Nor does it provide a basis for a recommended value, since this would be a function of how necessary public Internet access centres are (which in turn depends on the underlying level of ICT ownership). For this reason, many favour the approach of look at the number of villages (including towns and cities) with public Internet access facilities.

Identifying a core set of community access indicators, as shown in Table 1, could help countries in their choice of indicators when carrying out Internet user surveys or collecting administrative data from public Internet access centres. Apart from guiding ITU in its data collection efforts, the list also provides national regulators, ministries and statistical offices responsible for compiling market statistics with a clear guideline on the kind of data they should collect.

For the time being, a major objective is to understand how many villages, towns or cities within countries have public Internet access facilities and the percentage of the population these facilities cover. The core list highlights the need to distinguish between PIACs — the general term used to refer to any public facility offering Internet access — and so-called digital community centres (DCC), which must fulfil certain requirements (such as providing affordable access) and are usually subsidized or run by government.