Almost as many women as men use the Internet in Ghana, according to a new survey from the World Wide Web Foundation, which found men were just six per cent more likely to be online than women.
This is in sharp contrast to the large gender gap found globally where men are 21 per cent more likely to be online than women, rising to 52 per cent in the world’s least developed countries.
In Uganda, which also featured in the study, men were 43 per cent more likely to be online than women.
The survey showed that Ghana had made significant progress towards closing the gender gap in Internet access, with 29 per cent of women now online, up from fewer than 20 per cent in 2016, according to a previous report from the Web Foundation and the Media Foundation for West Africa.
However, the report warned that women using the Internet in Ghana still experienced a lower quality of connection to men, preventing them from fully benefiting from digital technology.
Ghana has a 14 per cent gender gap in “meaningful connectivity,” a measure based on whether users have fast speeds, enough data, a suitable device and regular access to the Internet.
Women surveyed were around half as likely as men to say they had Internet speeds sufficient to meet their online needs and, on average, they had smaller data bundles, with 75 per cent of women limited to 1GB data or less per month, compared with just 58 per cent of men.
Slow speeds and limited data severely constrain how people use the Internet, particularly for high-bandwidth applications needed to work and learn from home which, during the COVID-19 crisis, have become more important than ever.
Chenai Chair, Web Foundation Research Manager for Gender and Digital Rights, said, “Getting basic internet access is just the first step. To participate in digital society you need an affordable quality connection, you need the digital skills to use the internet and you need to feel safe online.
“While Ghana has seen important progress, it is still the case that women here – and around the world – face a multitude of barriers preventing them from realising the Internet’s full benefits.”
