Ranking the Caribbean on Internet Use

Above: St Kitts (CJ Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Which Caribbean countries use internet the most?

We took a look at the recently-released World Development Indicators report, which we used in last week’s story on mobile phone use in the Caribbean.

The World Bank’s data, which was based on the International Telecommunication Union’s World Telecommunication/ICT indicators database, looked at the number of individuals in each country using the internet as a percentage of the population.

The ITU’s data compiled the data from a survey defining internet users as people who used the internet, from any location, whether by computer, mobile phone, digital TV or other.

So which country in the Caribbean has the highest percentage of internet users? It’s St Kitts and Nevis, where 79 percent of the population are internet users, according to the data.

Coming in a tie for second were Aruba and the Cayman Islands, where in each of which 74 percent of the population were internet users.

The lowest rate on the list was in Haiti, where just 10 percent of the population used the Internet according to the 2012 data.

Haiti’s number would seem to be low, particularly in light of last week’s data showing 60 percent of the population with mobile phone subscriptions — that would seem to point to a decidedly small number of smart phones in use.

Not included in the report were British Overseas Territories excluding the Cayman Islands, along with the French Caribbean areas of Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Martin and the Dutch Caribbean.