Engagement in the knowledge economy: Regional patterns of content creation with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa

Journal article

The increasing digital connectivity has sparked many hopes about the democratization of information and knowledge production in Sub-Saharan Africa. To investigate the patterns of knowledge creation in the region and between other world regions we examine three key metrics: spatial distributions of academic articles (traditional knowledge production) and collaborative software development and Internet domain registrations (digitally-mediated knowledge production). We find that, contrary to the expectation of digital content to be more evenly geographically distributed than academic articles, the global and regional patterns of collaborative coding and domain registrations are more uneven than those of academic articles. Despite hopes of democratization afforded by the information revolution, Sub-Saharan Africa produces a lower share of digital content than academic articles. Our results suggest that the factors often framed as catalysts in the transformation to a knowledge economy do not relate to the three metrics uniformly. While connectivity is an important enabler of digital content creation, it seems to be only a necessary, not a sufficient condition: wealth, innovation capacity, and public spending on education are also important factors.

Authors: Ojanpera, S; Graham, M; Straumann, R; De Sabbata, S; Zook, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: USC Annenberg Press
• Journal: Information Technologies and International Development
• Volume: 13
• Pages: 33–51
• Publication date: 2017-02-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-11-16
• ISSN: 1544-7537
• Keywords: domain registrations; geographies of knowledge; digital divide; GitHub; information geographies; international development