You’ve probably read about various new media initiatives in Africa and wondered exactly what their point was, given the extremely limited Internet infrastructure in many African countries. But what exactly is the state of the African Internet, how many users are there? Where are they? And how are things going to develop in the next few years?

Fortunately some of the answers are in this rather beautiful infographic detailing Internet infrastructure improvement and capacity building in Africa (The data is drawn from a wide range of sources including work by the International Monetary Fund, InternetWorldStats, and the Millennium Development Goals.)

To my mind the most important graphic is the one detailing submarine cable projects, because it’s this investment in infrastructure which will bring internet connectivity to large parts of the continent in the next couple of years. And while I’d be keen to see some hard data on the increased capacity, things are clearly changing: the Internet is about to become a more significant part of many African’s lives in the next two or three years.

The infographic on the state of the ‘African Internet’ is the work of Jonathan Gosier, a software developer, writer, social entrepreneur and TED fellow who lives in Kampala, Uganda. The data is broken down further in this additional Flickr set. And you can even buy the full-sized poster here

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