Morocco becomes the third best country in Africa in terms of digital quality index
To provide more context, digital quality of life is a concept that determines the digital well-being of a territory's citizens in terms of five fundamental aspects. These are: internet accessibility, e-infrastructure, internet quality, public service digitisation and e-safety. Each of these parameters determines whether users have the necessary tools to perform basic or complex tasks. It is also key to identifying how many people have access to digital services such as study, information, telework, e-commerce, among others.
This fourth edition of the index took into account up to 14 parameters, including GDP per capita, the cost of mobile Internet and the cost of broadband Internet. The study conducted by Surfshark and published by Statista, which evaluates the quality of digital life, ranked Morocco as the third best on the African continent. The study is based on the analysis of information provided by the United Nations, the World Bank, Freedom House and the International Communications Union on 92 % of the world's population.
The CEO of Surfshark's VPN services company, Vytautas Kaziukonis, said that digital opportunities became more important than ever during the COVID-19 crisis. He emphasised the importance of each country ensuring fully remote operational capabilities for their economies.
In terms of the e-government index, Morocco has moved up three places and is now ranked 88th in the world. Although there has been a slight improvement, the index is still below the world average. In addition, Morocco scores well in e-security, ranking 42nd in 2022, up from 87th place in this index last year. In terms of internet accessibility, Morocco ranks 78th, losing 8 places compared to 2021.
Morocco has another low score in internet quality, especially in network speed and stability. The Kingdom lost 34 places in the ranking of this index, ranking 83rd, 19 points below the global average. Globally, Israel ranks first in the world in quality of digital life. On the African continent, Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Cameroon were the worst performers and are at the bottom of the annual ranking.
In contrast to the countries on the African continent, seven of the ten countries with the best digital quality of life index are in Europe. In the 2022 survey, Israel had the most affordable mobile internet access in the world, albeit of dubious quality and an infrastructure in need of improvement. The index looked at the number of hours people had to work per month to pay for access and found that Israelis can buy one gigabyte of mobile internet for just five seconds of work per month, 58 times less than in the United States. However, broadband internet affordability was more expensive at 19 minutes of work, but better than the global average of six hours of work. The list of European countries that would complete the top is, in ascending order, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany and Denmark.
Representing Asia are South Korea and Japan respectively. Both states have digital infrastructure capable of supporting 5G networks and are working to implement the 6G network in the coming years.
