Secure Internet servers (per 1 million people) - Country Ranking - Africa

Definition: The number of distinct, publicly-trusted TLS/SSL certificates found in the Netcraft Secure Server Survey.

Source: Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com/) and World Bank population estimates.

See also: Thematic map, Time series comparison

More rankings: Africa | Asia | Central America & the Caribbean | Europe | Middle East | North America | Oceania | South America | World |

Development Relevance: The quality of an economy's infrastructure, including power and communications, is an important element in investment decisions for both domestic and foreign investors. Government effort alone is not enough to meet the need for investments in modern infrastructure; public-private partnerships, especially those involving local providers and financiers, are critical for lowering costs and delivering value for money. In telecommunications, competition in the marketplace, along with sound regulation, is lowering costs, improving quality, and easing access to services around the globe. Today's smartphones and tablets have computer power equivalent to that of yesterday's computers and provide a similar range of functions. Device convergence is thus rendering the conventional definition obsolete. Comparable statistics on access, use, quality, and affordability of ICT are needed to formulate growth-enabling policies for the sector and to monitor and evaluate the sector's impact on development. Although basic access data are available for many countries, in most developing countries little is known about who uses ICT; what they are used for (school, work, business, research, government); and how they affect people and businesses. The global Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development is helping to set standards, harmonize information and communications technology statistics, and build statistical capacity in developing countries. However, despite significant improvements in the developing world, the gap between the ICT haves and have-nots remains. Access to telecommunication services rose on an unprecedented scale over the past two decades. This growth was driven primarily by wireless technologies and liberalization of telecommunications markets, which have enabled faster and less costly network rollout. Mobile communications have a particularly important impact in rural areas. The mobility, ease of use, flexible deployment, and relatively low and declining rollout costs of wireless technologies enable them to reach rural populations with low levels of income and literacy. The next billion mobile subscribers will consist mainly of the rural poor. Access is the key to delivering telecommunications services to people. If the service is not affordable to most people, goals of universal usage will not be met. Over the past decade new financing and technology, along with privatization and market liberalization, have spurred dramatic growth in telecommunications in many countries. With the rapid development of mobile telephony and the global expansion of the Internet, information and communication technologies are increasingly recognized as essential tools of development, contributing to global integration and enhancing public sector effectiveness, efficiency, and transparency.

Statistical Concept and Methodology: The number of secure Internet servers comes from the Netcraft Secure Server Survey. The survey examines the use of encrypted transactions through extensive automated exploration, tallying the number of web sites using HTTPS. This analysis relates to those sites found in the survey where the certificate is valid for the hostname, and the certificate has been issued from a publicly-trusted root. The geographical location is derived from the hosting location of the sites using the certificates. Data are divided by the mid-year population and multiplied by one million.

Aggregation method: Weighted average

Periodicity: Annual