Impact of poverty on ecommerce development and adoption a case study at Nyaudenge beach

Ecommerce (e-commerce) or electronic commerce is the purchasing, selling, and exchanging of goods and services over computer networks (such as the Internet) through which transactions or terms of sale are performed electronically. Ecommerce can be placed in several categories based on the parties involved in the transaction such as business to business or consumer to business. Use of technology that enables buyers to purchase or sellers to access business market globally by use of internet that poses challenges to people with low income. While ecommerce poses variety of challenges and problems ranging from lack of infrastructure, lack of ICT knowledge and skill, policies and laws to security concern, the study in this research concentrated on the impact of poverty on ecommerce. Poverty contributes to high rate of school dropouts and denies most young people a chance to be educated and acquire ICT skills. Most of those who drop out of school due to lack of school fees and early pregnancies for girls affected go to the lake to fish and to be involved in small business activities at the beach respectively. This group cannot afford to own a computer, train in ICT related fields and have no access to internet. On the other hand the little amount they get from the catch and small beach activities they claim is only for survival but not for saving or use in investments. Although poverty denies this group so many things in life, we detected that the low income group especially the ones at the beach use a lot of some ecommerce services through mobile phones and as such contribute much to ecommerce adoption.