By Sarjo Brito
One thing individuals and businesses rely on now more than ever is the internet. From communications to financial services, the digital age has paved the way for e-commerce, generating trillion of dollars in recent years. In 2019 alone, e-commerce was responsible for about 3.5 trillion in sales and is expected to hit 4.9 trillion dollars by 2021. Besides the fact that the new economy is digitally driven, other areas like politics and journalism have also been redefined under the digital age. For hours yesterday in The Gambia, an outage on the backup cable rendered data services in the country and international calls impossible. How does this affect individual data users but more so how many millions could the country be losing we ask?
Head of corporations, credit and business development at Bayba Lamin SM Bojang shares how the internet outage is affecting their operations and how risky it is to do their business transactions without access to the internet.
“If you look at the operations of Bayba, it is purely based on internet. The business units we have include the payment of remittances and this entirely depends on internet. Loans we also give depend on internet. So basically, the whole business is shutdown today. We can continue processing these transactions, but it is going to expose the institution to some risks’’
Whilst it may be hard to put a monetary value on how much they could be losing, head of operations at Easy Financial Services Jakaria Bah said the impact of the internet outage will without a doubt dealt a heavy blow on the numbers. Bah added that the past hours at the office have been unproductive as their work, especially remittance services, rely heavily on the internet.
“We deal with transfers that you must use the internet. You cannot pay people in our business without internet access nor can we even access our platform. Everything is on a standstill. We just sit here hoping for the best. Approximately we can lose $20,000 to $25,000 a day considering the number of products we have and the number of customers we engage a day. No internet means we have lost all that business today’’
Meanwhile at APS microfinance, the situation is nothing sort of different from other financial services.
‘’Normally around this time we have a lot of customers. People queue from here to the entrance but that is not the case today’’
Economist and political pundit Nyang Njie shares what this outage could cause the general economy. Njie said data services in this country ought to be taken more seriously, especially when we consider the fact that the new economy is a digital one and Gambia must up its game as a player.
‘’These are troubling times because whether we like it or not, we are players in the new economy and the new economy is digitally driven. Therefore, internet connectivity is part of everyday life and is no longer a luxury but a bare necessity of everyday life. For every hour that the internet is down, rest be assured that over 4000 to 7000 Gambians will not have the access to buy cash power, therefore that’s loss revenue for NAWEC. And every hour minimum, we can safely say that NAWEC will lose nothing less than 1.5 to 2million dalasi of power in terms of people wanting to buy. I think it’s time we take our data services seriously and how can we do this? The government of the Gambia, through PURA must agree that all Internet service providers must have a service level agreement to make sure that when downtimes happen, the economic loss of users must be paid for by the providers. It’s not acceptable in 2021 than in less than 35days, we have three internet outages. The President of this country missed a meeting with his fellow colleagues at ECOWAS because of our internet downtime. It is not acceptable’’
