With 2.6 billion people completely offline from the Internet as of early 2025, and another 2 billion barely meaningfully connected, more than half of humanity faces the 'Connectivity Crisis'.
Drawing from firsthand experience and rigorous analyses, this book explores both being unconnected and meaningful connectivity as a basic human right and offers practical strategy, collaborative, technical, policy, regulatory and leadership recommendations for bridging the global digital divide.
Inspired by Kettering's "a problem well stated is half solved", Pareto's 80:20 law and real-world digital exclusion realities in developing countries, the book examines how leaders, policy makers, entrepreneurs, multi-lateral development banks and industry stakeholders can collaborate to start addressing this Connectivity Crisis.
This is both a personal account of a problem affecting billions and a call to action for anyone positioned to make a difference. Whether you're a government leader, ICT Minister, development banker, engineer, student, or decision-maker, this book invites you to take bold steps towards universal digital access and help transform billions of lives through meaningful connectivity.
The regulation of network industries, economic regulation and regulating digital platforms collectively impact and shape the economies of countries, as well as affecting all of their consumers and citizens. Regulation is therefore incredibly important to every sector. The costs of poor regulation to a country are just humongous. This book is founded on the belief that market failures in many sectors of [developing] economies, including in energy, telecoms, water, transportation, health, aviation, education, banking, etc. are due - in large part - to the failure of regulation.
However, the truth is that good regulation is complex, nuanced, idiosyncratic to the local country context, and not one-size-fit-all across countries. These call for more education and awareness of the true importance of regulation, as well as demystifying it as much as possible. These are the dual challenges of this book.
Many textbooks/books on regulation and/or peer reviewed articles are written by expert economists, lawyers, social science or political science experts. Not this book - which is authored by a trained scientist and engineer. For this reason, the perspective on demystifying regulation is unique and different - disassembling it as much as possible, and putting it back together in order to construct more explicable and repeatable 'art and science' to regulation.
Digitalising economies has consequences: ranging from Big Tech competition risks, cybercrime, harmful online content, fake news and disinformation, to social media amplification algorithms, and much more.
The digital economy is increasingly a part of our world, presenting new challenges for regulators and policy-makers.
This book explores, in-depth, the key policy considerations for the digital economy and offers recommendations on potential solutions for policy makers and regulators to help develop a balanced, efficient, and coordinated approach in regulating a complex environment.
Beginning with an introduction to the Internet Value Chain (IVC) and its economic impacts, the author provides structure and characterisation of the positive and negative externalities, the latter in terms of their risks and harms, considering how these need to be controlled or regulated.
The regulatory principles and best practices we need to consider in the digital economy are defined using a combination of the current offline telecoms, media & technology challenges and new Big Tech risks and harms, along with the numerous online issues arising from the IVC.
The supplementary section of this volume identifies many thematic challenging areas of the digital economy problem statement, defines them more granularly and make some brief recommendations on what, where and how digital economy policy-makers can start addressing them.
This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in internet regulation or digital economy policy. In addition, it will be helpful for those involved in designing policies, regulations, research programmes or strategies related to these subjects.
The challenging new Digital Economy areas covered in depth:
This book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in internet regulation or digital economy policy. In addition, it will be helpful for those involved in designing policies, regulations, research programmes or strategies related to these subjects.
This book argues forcefully and unapologetically that Emerging Economies must consider the Telecommunications, Media and Technology (TMT) as a single 'nerve centre' of their future economies, and offers a clear blueprint for its realisation.
Dr Nwana has true pedigree and is a recognised and respected participant in the TMT world. His book provides hundreds of critical recommendations across contemporary TMT areas.
This book is 550-plus pages of proven and practical know-how. Readers who want a hype-filled, superficial TMT introductory book should look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you want a comprehensive and realistic guide to TMT for emerging economies in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, India, China and elsewhere, this volume is for you.
Professor William Webb, FIET - CEO of Weightless SIG and President-Elect of the IET writes of the volume:
"Making use of a high level of evidence and data throughout, the book is an outstanding blend of information on key areas of the TMT world, and how they can be applied specifically to the case of Developing Economies, including Africa. There are not many books that offer the possibility of changing the world, but this is one of them. It should be obligatory reading for all those involved in this exciting TMT area".
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