Kenya’s global ranking in supporting online shopping has dropped
partly on rising fears of hacking, a fresh United Nations report
suggested on Monday, potentially slowing down the march towards a
cash-lite economy.
Nairobi has fallen seven positions
to 89 in the latest rankings the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD) uses to gauge the environment countries are
providing to support online transactions.
The UN body
has revised downwards Kenya’s 2018 score on secure Internet servers,
which act a proxy for e-commerce shops such as Jumia and Safaricom’s
Masoko, to 37 from 43 a year earlier.
The score on secure server penetration is among three other
indicators the UN uses to measure how conducive the environment is to
support the adoption of e-commerce.
Nairobi’s score on
reliable postal delivery for goods bought online also fell to 27 from 37
previously. The closer the ranking is to 100, the higher the score.
The
country, however, got more marks in levels of Internet access, which
improved from 27 to 39, while the score on payment methods rose to 82
from 72 helped by high penetration of mobile money such M-Pesa where
Kenya is a global leader.
Kenya’s overall score in the
2018 UNCTAD B2C (business to consumer) e-commerce index, however,
improved 3.7 to 46.2 compared to last year’s measure, implying a slower
pace of improvement compared to other countries globally.
The
UN has ranked Kenya seventh in Africa in providing a conducive
environment for online transactions behind Mauritius which is ranked
55th globally, Nigeria (75), South Africa (77), Tunisia (79), Morocco
(81) and Ghana (85).
“It is estimated that there were
at least 21 million online shoppers in Africa in 2017 or less than two
per cent of the world total. Three countries (Nigeria, South Africa and
Kenya) together, accounted for almost half of them,” UNCTAD says in the
report.
“The number of shoppers has surged annually by
18 per cent since 2014, higher than the world average growth rate of 12
per cent.”
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