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The Adoption and Diffusion of Information and Communication Technology in the Base of the Pyramid Population of Sub-Saharan Africa: A Study of Nigerian University Students Alice Sunday Etim A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Information and Library Science. Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by, Dr. Evelyn Daniel Dr. Paul Solomon Dr. Jane Greenberg Dr. Claudia Gollop Dr. Valentine James © 2010 Alice Sunday Etim ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Alice Sunday Etim The Adoption and Diffusion of Information and Communication Technology in the Base of the Pyramid Population of Sub-Saharan Africa: A Study of Nigerian University Students Under the direction of Dr. Evelyn Daniel The global environment is a complex network of people who are grouped using different types of information. In each country, people are grouped based on such information as age, race, ethnicity, educational qualification, income, occupation, and net worth. These socioeconomic descriptions of people have relevance in our current Information Age. This dissertation addresses a socioeconomic group, the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) population of Sub-Saharan Africa and investigates a sub-set of that population, the university students in Nigeria on their adoption of modern information and communication technology (ICT). The ICT tools and services that were looked at in this study were computers, Internet and mobile phones. Prior to conducting the study, theories and models of human needs, poverty, information seeking behavior, technology acceptance and diffusion as well as the literature on these topics was analyzed. Six research questions were asked and used to explore issues of ICT access, affordability, acceptance and adoption. The survey method was used to collect data from a self-selected sample of 300 students at the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Two focus group interviews were used to further examine the results of the survey. The data were analyzed and reported. The findings were that students accepted ICT and despite their extreme economic poverty, basic Nokia mobile phones diffused successfully. However, computer iii technology, the Internet and smart mobile phones did not diffuse because the students could not afford expensive forms of ICT tools and services. The cost of computers was a significant factor that limited its adoption. A large proportion (79 percent) of study participants who could not afford to own computers accessed them at fee paid Internet cafés. The students used their basic mobile phones mostly for voice communication in part because advanced tasks like e- learning or Internet access were not supported by these basic phones. They desired their mobile phones to provide better support for their information seeking behavior. They desired additional features to their basic mobile phones – Internet access, music, longer battery life, location/logistics intelligence, support for their educational/field research and television. It was also established that factors in the mobile phone technology adoption model (MOPTAM) – personal factors (including technology advancement and technology orientation), perceived ease of use and facilitating conditions such as cost and quality of service influenced attitude towards the use of mobile phones. Overall, the students perceived mobile technology as an innovation that they could no longer live without and that it had the potential to help improve their lives. iv DEDICATION To my heroes: My late parents, relatives and grade school teachers for instilling in me the passion for academics and the love of learning. I am eternally grateful to them. Your dreams and labor of love live on. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A dissertation of this nature is a project that spans several years and it is never the work of one person. As a young physicist many years ago at the Polytechnic (now the University of Science & Technology), Calabar, Nigeria, I studied famous scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. I can say that I have come to agree with Newton‘s famous saying that ―If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.‖ My dissertation adviser, committee members and the writers, whose works that I have cited, are the shoulders on which I stand. I thank the Lord Almighty for giving me the ability to embark on this study. He gave me an inner strength and wisdom to work on each piece at a time. My utmost gratitude goes to my adviser, Dr. Evelyn Daniel, for being very supportive of me and the dissertation. She was always there to guide, discuss, answer questions, and read every draft. I requested weekend meetings a few times and she was always accessible. I thank Dr. Daniel also for working with the Dean of School of Information and Library Science (SILS), Dr. Barbara Moran, to provide a small grant that helped with my travel to Nigeria for the data collection. I could not have done this work without such interest and support from my adviser. Thank you so much, Dr. Daniel! I am grateful to Dr. Paul Solomon for showing interest in me and my research ideas when I arrived at UNC Chapel Hill. He agreed to continue in my Dissertation Committee even when he took a new assignment at the University of South Carolina. I sincerely thank Dr. Jane Greenberg, Dr. Claudia Gollop and Dr. Valentine James for serving on my Dissertation Committee and working with vi me through the different phases of the dissertation. I want to express my gratitude to other faculty members and staff at SILS and UNC Chapel Hill for suggestions, discussions and for helping move my research proposal through the UNC IRB process. I commend my fellow doctoral students at SILS and my social network for pointing me to relevant reading resources. My shout goes out to Dr. Stephen Bassey and my new friends at the University of Uyo, Nigeria who helped me with data collection. I am grateful to Dr. Cathy Zimmer of the Odum Institute, UNC Chapel Hill for providing valuable time to look at my data and for working with me through the data analysis phase. I thank Dr. Ita Ekanem, a retired official of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) for providing valuable insights on the socioeconomic issues confronting Sub- Saharan Africa. Last, but not least, I thank my husband, Dr. James Etim, and our son, David. They provided the love and support that I needed to help me stay focused on completing the dissertation work. vii PREFACE This dissertation is a culmination of many years of education, experience, reflections, observations and research. Two internship opportunities, one at Shell Petroleum, Nigeria and the other at Cross River Television, Nigeria enabled me to develop interest in information and communication technology (ICT) research. Another major opportunity that contributed to my interest in ICT and most importantly, how students in underserved communities perceived ICT in their small world was during the mid 1990s when I worked as a school teacher at the Mississippi Public Schools. I was teaching business and computer applications but without any computer in my classroom. As difficult as it was to do this, I did it for two semesters before help came from the State government. I represented my high school on a pilot program that was provided through a grant-funded project with the University of Southern Mississippi. I was trained to come back and teach a third course to my students, and that course were called technology discovery. The goal for adding the course to the curriculum was to help prepare students for job placement through the cooperative learning and work study program. With the new program, my classroom was fully equipped with computers and specialized tools that are used in different industries. My students‘ attitude toward school and learning changed. They came to class on time, paid attention during lessons, and enjoyed being on task through the 90 minutes of block schedule. Their interest in computers and other digital equipment like cameras was beyond belief. The students did more work than before, became very enthusiastic about the lessons and showed creativity in their work. Some of them shared with me their career goals, interests and the desire to go to college to further their studies. There were fourteen modules that viii represented different fields/industries – computing/electronic communications, engineering designs via CAD/CAM, photography, the medical, oil drilling, etc. A student spent one week on a module and rotated through the fourteen modules during the fourteen weeks of a semester. A student‘s work and interest in each module was tracked and the data was used to provide career path recommendations to the program leads. My recommendations helped the students to be placed on jobs. This experience made me conclude that technology was highly needed by students and should be integrated into every classroom. Other experiences that factored into having the motivation for an ICT research such as this included my ten and half years of work in software engineering with IBM Corporation, volunteering, the articles that I have written and coming to UNC to pursue a PhD at SILS. While I was at IBM, I volunteered each year through a statewide Engineers‘ Week (the new name is EWeek) program with local schools in order to encourage students to consider career paths in math, science and engineering. I volunteered in a middle school in Durham, North Carolina. I drew from my observations to write an article on integrating technology and the Internet in middle school classrooms. My recent publication (published in 2009) is an article that was written while in the SILS PhD program. It was done through a book project that was directed by one my dissertation committee members, Dr.

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