UN ranks Nigeria 94th among countries with readiness for e-commerce

Nigeria has dropped six places in the latest United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s Business-to-Consumer (B2C) E-commerce Index 2020.

Nigeria which was ranked 88 in 2019 has now dropped to 94th position out of 152 countries that were considered prepared enough to engage in e-commerce.

The development means that in Nigeria, a country with one of the largest internet populations in the world, the citizens will rather go to physical stores than shop online.

In the index, countries were scored based on access to secure internet servers, reliability of postal services and infrastructure, and the portion of their population that uses the internet and has an account with a financial institution or a provider of mobile money services.

Nigeria’s scores were as follow:

On access to the Internet (26), the share of individuals with an account (40), secure Internet services (36), and UPU postal reliability (83).

In all these, Nigeria recorded an average score of 46.2 out of 100, a decline of -3.0points from its 2019 tally.

Mauritius and South Africa retained the top two positions in Africa followed by Tunisia, Algeria, Ghana, and Libya in third, fourth, fifth, and sixth positions respectively.

READ ALSO: Okonjo-Iweala challenges Africa to take advantage of e-commerce to engender trading competitiveness

While Nigeria dropped from third to eighth in Africa.

“To facilitate more inclusive e-commerce, African countries would benefit from catching up in all policy areas,” UNCTAD analysts wrote in the report.

“In the case of Internet access, less than a third of the population in Africa uses the Internet compared to three quarters in Western Asia.”

The assessment is done on a scale of 1-100 and a score closer to 100 signals improvement in policies to support online shopping and vice versa.

On the global scale, Switzerland leapfrogged the Netherlands to become the number one country in the world in e-commerce with a score of 95.9 to the Dutch’s 95.8.

However, both countries dropped 0.1 and 0.7 points respectively in the latest ranking.

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