The term ‘digital divide’ found its way into common parlance yonks ago. Initially, it referred to the division between those who had access to the telephone and those who did not. After the late 1990s, it began to be used mainly to describe the split between those with and those without Internet access.

It is only those who are utterly uninformed who would be surprised to learn that a massive digital divide does exist between Africa and the more developed countries in what prominent Kenyan-born pan-Africanist Professor Patrick Lumumba likes to term ‘the conceptual West’ – saying simply that a country like Australia is in the West does not cut it for him.

The reasons for the persistence of the huge – and widening – chasm that separates our continent and the likes of Europe and North America are, of course, numerous. Cost is one of them.

According to a new report published by the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), the cost of Internet access in Africa, as a proportion of income, is actually among the highest in the world.

The A4AI is an initiative of The Web Foundation, an outfit founded by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee in partnership with organisations such as Google and Facebook.

As far as the A4AI is concerned, where the cost of a gygabyte of mobile broadband data exceeds 2% of the user’s monthly income, then it ceases to be affordable. The organisation’s new report, released last month, found that, on average, the cost of a 1 GB data bundle in Africa is equivalent to 7.12% of monthly income. But citizens of countries like Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic pay more than one-fifth of what they earn in a month to acquire this amount of broadband data. This is equivalent to R20 out of every R100 that one earns.

Egypt and Mauritius were found to be the African countries with the most affordable data bundles, with 1 GB costing 0.5% and 0.59% respectively of average monthly income.

There is at least one positive takeaway from the report, though: while data prices remain prohibitively expensive, costs are falling faster in low-income countries than in middle- income countries. The A4AI, which based its report on surveys conducted in 136 countries, regards South Africa as a middle-income country, alongside the likes of Malaysia, Colombia, India, Jamaica and Ghana. Their low-income counterparts, where data costs are falling at a faster rate, include Nepal, Mali, Haiti, Liberia, Yemen and Mozambique.

In view of all this, efforts by the South African authorities – including the Independent Communications Authority, the Competition Commission and government itself – to lower the cost of data should be lauded.

Not so long ago, the Competition Commission named and shamed telecommunications giants Vodacom and MTN for pricing data higher in South Africa than in the other markets in which they operate. The commission was particularly scathing of Vodacom and MTN, as well as the country’s other mobile network operators, for punishing the poorest of the poor, who buy data in small bundles, by making them pay more on a per megagyte or gigabyte basis. It found that, for instance, relative to a 1 GB data bundle, a consumer who bought a 100 MB data bundle paid roughly twice on a per megabyte basis for the same data period validity.

The commission’s other gripe is the lack of transparency around data pricing, which, it says, inhibits price competition, as consumers are not aware of the effective rates. It points out that consumers may mistake the occasional promotion of free data that goes unused as providing lower rates than may be the case.

Of course, government must shoulder part of the blame. It has not allocated spectrum in the past 14 years, and the mobile network operators argue that, if more spectrum was available, data prices could be as much as 50% lower. They further argue that the lack of spectrum also prevents them from being more aggressive. This, they add, affects volumes and impacts on the ability to reduce prices.

One hopes that recent moves to allocate spectrum – including the release of the long-awaited policy on high-demand spectrum and the policy direction on the licensing of a wireless open-access network – will indeed pave the way for the imminent allocation of this valuable resource.