Africa’s digital divide is assumed to be closed by accelerating cell phone connectivity and lowering the prices of digital gargets. Kenya is a showcase of IT innovation. It is the forefront of mobile money transfer innovation. Over 70 percent of the unbacked rural and lower income people use the Mpesa, the now widely used mobile money exchange platform or some variety of it.
However, has this so called digital revolution sweeping Africa translated into real change in household incomes? Has it translated into more civic consciousness? Are people more participatory in economic development? How has the mobile phone connectivity in Kenya helped in market knowledge?
This paper will interrogate these questions in the context of the following factors: the affordability of mobile phones (especially smart phones) for rural communities and lower income urban groups; the percentage of people connected to the power grids for charging mobile; fibre optic connection. Existence of platforms and support frames to help marginalized people to realize the full potential of the mobile telephony (e.g. linkages to markets, civic participation).
Without holistic approach, using other macroeconomic tools to close the poverty gap, information technologies will not help reduce the digital divide; it can even widen it further in more subtle way, into what I will tentatively call meta-classification.
A survey will be conducted in the cosmopolitan counties of Nairobi and more rural counties in eastern and central regions of Kenya guided by an instrument to be development to the questions raised here.