[kictanet] National survey shows Kenyan Internet market heading towards “critical mass”

[alice]

  (from Balancing Act)



  National survey shows Kenyan Internet market heading towards “critical
  mass”

The latest national survey from market research company Synovate shows 
Kenya’s Internet market is growing fast and on the basis of this growth 
will soon reach “critical mass”. The growth in users is coming from both 
urban and rural areas and is predominantly amongst the young and well 
educated. Russell Southwood pored over the results.

The total sample for this random survey was 1,500 people, with 500 of 
those in a boost sample from across the major districts of Kenya. 
Therefore the coverage is nationally representative of adults 15 and 
above and has a sampling margin of error of + or – 3%. It makes 
comparisons with a similar survey it carried out in 2007.

On the basis of this sample, Synovate estimates that there are now 3.5 
million Internet users in Kenya. However, daily Internet use has grown 
from 2% of the respondents in 2007 to 5% in 2009 and weekly use from 5% 
to 12% over the same period. The daily use figure is the crucial one as 
it shows users who are finding that that they cannot do without Internet 
services.

If the weekly Internet use is broken down on an urban vs rural basis, 
urban use grew from 22% of respondents in 2007 to 30% in 2009. Rural use 
grew from 4% to 9% over the same period. These results confirm a lot of 
anecdotal evidence that has been reaching us about young people using 
the Government’s new Internet centres and cyber cafes in rural areas.

The lower income groups recorded a much more fast paced growth in 
internet access. However Internet penetration within middle class and 
below is still very low, making it the group with the highest growth 
potential. And following the expected drop in Internet costs LSM 4-10s 
should provide the highest growth in usage. At least half the non-users 
across all social categories said they would be interested in using the 
Internet if they had access.

In terms of age, 50% of the respondents using Internet were aged 15-34 
with 21% in the 18-24 age bracket. The upcoming generation of Kenyans 
will be regular users of the Internet and it will form as much part of 
their lives as mobile phones. Over 56% of the Internet using respondents 
were college or University educated. Therefore those countries with 
better education levels in Africa will show markedly higher Internet 
penetration levels.

On average, the Internet users in the sample spent approximately 70 
minutes on the Internet per visit. This level of media user is close to 
the average time spent on television on daily basis but does not 
challenge radio use which is much higher. This will inevitably impact on 
the media usage of key socio-demographic groups. Although the survey 
results did not include newspapers, it is likely to be them that suffer 
as younger generation make less use of the printed word in getting 
information.

The big shift in where sample respondents accessed the Internet between 
2007 and 2009 has been a significant fall in the number of those using 
Internet cafes and a commensurate rise in the number using mobile 
phones. Strikingly, this trend – of using mobile phones for access – is 
more pronounced amongst the rural part of the sample. This is bad news 
for cyber-cafes for despite rising numbers of users they are not coming 
their way. But this is good news for mobile operators if they can get 
their mobile Internet offers cheap and pre-paid.

The five top uses of the Internet range between 40-50% of the sample 
users and were in descending order: entertainment; games and music; 
social networking and instant messaging; e-mails; general surfing; and 
job search. The pattern is very close to existing mobile usage (with the 
exception of job search) if you take SMS as the equivalent of e-mails.

Users are starting with what they know but will inevitably become more 
adventurous as more content and services are put on offer. Not 
surprisingly it is the young who are disproportionately more likely to 
be members of social networking sites but membership is more likely to 
be male than female. Facebook was by far the most popular site although 
You Tube (which features in the Top 10 sites used in Kenya according to 
Alexa.com) does not feature. BBC, CNN and The Nation are the most used 
news sites.

The significance of these findings is that Kenya is both one of Africa’s 
largest mid-scale markets and is a bell-weather in terms of technology 
adoption. Crudely, what happens in Kenya will start to happen elsewhere. 
And as the uptake of M-Money services shows, this is not simply an 
urban, well-educated, middle class phenomenon.

Critical mass kicks in when the number of users starts to create 
networking effects. In other words, existing users start to draw in new 
users who don’t want to be left out. In Kenya, this is clearly already 
beginning starting to happen. And although the number of daily Internet 
users is smaller than the overall estimated total of 3.5 million, it is 
beginning to grow significant and will continue to do so as access 
prices fall and local content offers become more varied.

For more details either e-mail Joe Otin of Synovate on 
Joe.Otin at synovate.com <mailto:Joe.Otin at synovate.com> or phone him on 
+254 4450190-6.