To reach Information and Communications Technology (ICT) growth African countries need to develop national broadband strategies to compete with developing nations, says an official from Huawei Technologies.

On Tuesday Huawei launched its second annual Global Connectivity Index (GCI) in Shenzhen, China, which ranked 50 economies in terms of connectivity, ICT usage, and digital transformation.

The index focuses on a total of 38 variables such as networks, connectivity, computing, mobile adoption, digital economy, service demand and e-commerce to determine the position of each of the 50 nations.

The variables are divided across four areas namely supply, demand, experience and potential being measured and analysed.

And the 50 countries are listed under three categories namely leaders, followers and beginners on the GCI list.

South Africa and Egypt are ranked number 33 and 36 respectively and fall under the followers' category.

While, Morocco, Algeria, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana fall under the beginners section of the index – the countries are ranked 42, 43, 46, 47, and 48 respectively.

According to Chin Foong Ling, principal analyst for global connectivity, Index Group Market Insight Department said countries with higher GCI scores were also countries with a higher gross domestic (GDP) per capita.

"Developing countries have a big gap between the experience and demand (methodology areas) compared with advanced countries.

"Experience in affordability and download speeds, which results in them falling behind advanced countries, said Ling.

She added, "When people don't have a good experience and don't have enough content we see that in the number of apps downloaded is much lower in developing countries – and all this demand and experience drags nations to a lower ranking."

Executive director of the board, chief strategy marketing officer at Huawei, William Xu told ITWeb Africa that African countries can boost their ranking on lists like the GCI and improve their ICT standings.

"If China wants to improve their ranking among developing countries... we need to improve the bandwidth capita by 50% and the bandwidth should reach 5mbps.

"So for the African countries the bandwidth and coverage should be further enhanced," he explained.

What also needs to be considered is whether there is sufficient content for users, said Xu.

"For each smartphone user – how many apps are they using? You need to have sufficient apps on their smartphones," he stated.

* Simnikiwe is in Shenzhen, China for the 2015 Huawei Global Analyst Summit.