While smartphones are becoming a vital part of online shopping across the globe as a result of mobile devices, new findings from Google’s consumer Barometer tool released Wednesday has revealed that 85% of people in Nigeria use smartphones for product research as against 30% using computers and 6% using tablets respectively.

When Dr. Omobola Johnson, Minister of Communication Technology, while delivering a policy paper at the recently concluded International Telecommunications Union Conference, said that Nigeria was quickly able to contain the dreaded Ebola disease as a result of the widely available telecoms infrastructure, it again brought to the fore, how pervasive the impact of telecommunications is.

The advent of social media has made more Nigerian youths internet literate to a reasonable extent. They now access all necessary information via the internet using their mobile phone. The most visited websites by young people are social websites including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Executive Vice Chairman, EVC of the commission, Dr Eugene Juwah who has consistently reaffirmed this said his administration has deliberately made the distribution of digital dividends a cardinal point in its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to ensure that every Nigerian benefits from the telecom revolution.

Going by the prohibitive cost of broadband, over two billion people in the developing and emerging countries, are cut off from the benefits of internet ubiquity. A major percentage of these people, according to a new report by the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), are Nigerians. It becomes more worrisome considering the fact that women and rural dwellers are affected most in this unfortunate situation.