The New Poor – Internet Penetration Rates by Country

Yesterday is Blog Action day and tons of bloggers posted about single topic – poverty. It is a topic very close to my heart for various reasons. It is a very sad thing not to have food or shelter or healthy living conditions. But man has thrived in all those situations just because he learned how to become better. In my opinion lack of knowledge is much more serious than lack of food. That is one reason why even the poorest parents in the world would love to see their kids going to school, so that they can learn and become better. I want to sensitize my readers about this issue: the new poor – people without information.. Internet penetration can be considered as one parameter to measure information hunger in the world. So I spent sometime yesterday gathering the data about this and created a heat map.

Mapping Internet Penetration Rates in World Countries

I took the data about internet penetration from Internet World Stats and used this in the World heat map excel that my friend Robert (of Excel Dashboards fame) once shared with me to create a map like this:

Download the excel file with the map of world internet penetration rates

Darker countries have less internet penetration. Sadly this map correlates highly with a world poverty map. I guess attacking the information access issues can eventually solve the poverty.

Also checkout Nathan’s visualization on poverty rates in US