Dr Ghaith Fariz, director of the Arab Knowledge Report, launched the study yesterday in Dubai - Randi Sokoloff / The National
Another great guest post from The National's media maven, Keach Hagey:Arabic is
the fastest-growing language on the internet. By a lot. From 2000 to
2008, the growth rate in Arabic-speaking internet users was 2064 per
cent, more than three times the rate of grown of Chinese.
But
ICT was a rare point of light amidst the gloom.
For one thing, they're
investing. In 2008, Arab countries recorded levels of development in
technological performance exceeding those observed in all other regions
of the world, according to the World Bank Report on Knowledge
Assessment Methodology. Four Arab countries -- UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and
Kuwait -- have been listed among the top 50 countries most ready to use
ICT, according to the World Economic Forum in 2008.
But
the potential is very uneven. Only in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is
personal computer ownership higher than the global average. And
bandwidth in the region is still pretty appalling -- less than half of
the global average of bits of bandwidth per person even even the two
most networked countries, Qatar and the UAE. As an example, the report
notes that internet users in the US, Canada, the UK, Singapore and
Japan enjoy speeds faster than one billion kilobits per second; in most
Arab countries, the connection speeds range from 128kb to 102kh. So if
this page seemed to take a long time to load, it's not in your head.
But
of course the real guts of the beast, and the purpose of the report, is
content, content, content. And in this realm, despite the rapid uptake
of internet use among Arabic speakers, is still dismal. According to a
2007 study by Madar, the Digital Economy Research Centre in Dubai, out
of forty million of the forty billion web pages it looked at were
Arabic-only -- or one thousandth of the total.
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