ABSTRACT

The African continent just like in other parts of the world has an over whelming number of Intra African free trade agreements in which a number of countries comes together in other to enable free trade among them and also a range of other agreements but despite these significant number of free trade agreements among the African countries ,this continent is still regarded as the least developed when it comes to information technology, the focus of this paper is to determine the impact of this free trade agreements on information technology .
After thorough analysis of the intra African free trade agreements such as ECOWAS and that of an African country and a high income country, It has be seen that the intra African free trade agreements has not done much to improve information technology compared to what can be achieved when they formed free trade agreements with the high income countries such as the U.S. and Morocco free trade agreements. Nevertheless, attention should be given to the fact that about 9 million or more people have largely been left out of the "global information society" and it is also undeniable that, the importance of information technology cannot be over emphasized in the development of any nation in which the African countries are not an exception. Lack of policies and strategies, prerequisites such as dependable electricity and too much foreign dependence are some of the main issues that are affecting the development of information technology in Africa.

Key Words: Free Trade Agreement, Information Technology, Telecommunications,Africa

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http://www.writework.com/essay/define-regional-economic-integration
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Community
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http://www.eac.int/

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http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ict/
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