By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Sudan led the pack in 2019 with an $1.8 billion loss in internet and social media shutdowns in Africa that cost $2.1 billion continentwide.
Africa suffered about 25 per cent of the global economic impact of web blackouts which amounted to $8 billion.
Sudan, a landlocked country with the largest land mass in Africa, recorded 1,560 hours of web shutdown out of the total 8,000 hours on the continent, according to The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns in 2019 report.
The report excluded internet outages due to natural disasters or infrastructural failure.
The report calculated the economic cost of blackouts using the Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST) developed by internet access advocacy groups, The Internet Society and Netblocks.
COST estimates economic impact of internet disruption and restrictions using indicators from the World Bank, International Telecommunication Union, Eurostat and United States Census.
The estimated cost accounted for lost earnings across telecommunications networks as well as hobbled online payments for digital businesses.
Internet and social media blackouts, the forte of authoritarian African regimes, proved most costly in Sudan in 2019, the consequence of protracted protests which led to the ouster Omar Al-Bashir, whose iron rule lasted decades.
Despite the tactics of the Sudanese government, however, internet savvy protesters evaded access restrictions to share imagery that galvanised the protests.
Cumulative internet and social media blackouts in Algeria lasted 50 hours at a cost of $199 million.
The economic impact of a shutdown is not solely determined by its length as it also depends largely on the scale of internet penetration in a country.
In Chad, social media apps were blocked for a record 16 months. With only 6.5 per cent of the population connected to the internet, the economic impact of the shutdowns (calculating for days in 2019 alone) came to $125.9 million.
The cost of access restrictions also impacted in other ways.
In Uganda, a controversial social media tax branded by critics as a curb on online expression, resulted in a drop in internet users.
And, with local mobile money use also negatively impacted, one study estimated that the fees could cost the Ugandan economy $750 million.
