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Title: ICT usage survey 2001: a survey on the ICT adoption of businesses in Mauritius-[World Wide Web]

Notes: The survey was conducted in August 2001 through a stratified sample survey on 300 business establishments in the Island of Mauritius. It complements the efforts of the NCB in assessing ICT adoption, usage and penetration, following the IT Household Survey 2000. The emphasis this time is placed on the business community in terms of the extent of the use of information and communications technologies such as computers, Internet, e-mails and e-commerce across key economic sectors of the country. The information gathered thereby can provide useful input for the elaboration of ICT policies, notably with regard to areas such as ICT professionals, ICT culture promotion, development and adoption of new ICT trends such as E-commerce. This will also help to update our current ICT statistics, which is useful to stakeholders in the ICT sector as well. The main findings of the survey were: 83.3% of business establishments surveyed owned at least one computer. Computer usage by business activity fluctuated in the range of 50 to 100%. 37.3% of establishments have between one to three servers. 24.3% of establishments have between one to three PCs and 20% of them have more than 20 PCs. The most widely used software packages were office tools (96%), financial and accounting packages (44.8%), inventory/stock control system (28.4%), and payroll system (27.2%). 43% have Local Area Networks (LAN) and 12.7% have Wide Area Networks (WAN). Electronic transfer of funds are conducted by 17% of the establishments while only 10.7% of them indicated using electronic data interchange4 on the internet. 90% of the computerised establishments have access to the Internet. 75% of all establishments surveyed have access to the Internet. Internet usage is high in sectors like manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants, transport, storage and communication and banking and finance. Use of the Internet in the education and training sector is 63.2%. Use of the Internet in public administration is 72.7% 21.3% of the establishments have websites and 27.1% of them hosted their website at site of work but the majority (72.9%) of them have their websites hosting outsourced. Establishments face a number of constraints in adopting e-commerce. The main ones reported have been the limited size of the market (42.2%), inadequate IT infrastructure (31%), shortage of IT skills (26.2%) and that goods or services produced do not lend themselves to transactions over the Internet (23%). It is observed that the proportion of ICT staff to the total number of employees turned around a threshold of 11% during the year 2001. 46.1% of staff employed is qualified up to the computer literacy skill level.

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