Some figures from the ICT Africa Telecom People Forum in Abidjan

For its 11th edition, the International ICT Forum, Africa Telecom People, was dedicated to e-commerce. During the five plenary sessions and the three workshops, participants were able to learn about this sector featuring a great potential of growth and employment for Africa: How to develop the sector? What on-line means of payment to favour? What infrastructures and which legal and fiscal environment to set up? What role for mobile money?

For IPEMED, it was the occasion to present its report “e/m-commerce in Morocco, Tunisia, Ivory Coast and Senegal " which is being finalised. M Alain Ducass, main author of the report, took part in workshop 3: how can companies integrate mobile money platforms into their payment methods? and Mr Jean-Marc Kawdjane, co-author of the report, took part in plenary 5: how to help the youth take better advantage of e-commerce?

These exchanges enabled to highlight some key points on e-commerce in Ivory Coast:
- the significant potential of the sector;
- the difficulties linked to insufficient logistics and poor distribution and the importance to set up a local quality network of distributors;
- the weakness of the (non-existent) industrial sector and that of the (badly organized) craft sector hindering the export capacity of the e-commerce sector;
- the difficulty for start-ups to reach the API (application programming interface) of certain services of mobile payment.

Key figures on the country’s situation were also presented :
- ¾ of the population is less than 35 years old;
- 21 million mobile subscribers out of 23 million inhabitants;
- 5 million users of e-commerce and 4 million on-line purchases in 2014;
- 7 000 km of already deployed optical fiber network and 3 000 km more to come.