Web woes shatter young Yemenis' dreams of startups, studies

ADEN, Yemen－Yemeni entrepreneur Obeid al-Bakri launched a ride-sharing app to provide safe transport in the southern city of Aden, but his plans quickly ran into trouble－the internet was so slow that no one could get online to book a ride.

"Aden was absolutely fertile ground for a ride-sharing app," said the 34-year-old TakeMe founder. "But the internet was just too slow."

Blighted by years of conflicts and economic crisis, Yemen's slow and costly internet limits access to everyday services from banking to online classes and transport. For young people, it can mean missing out on economic and educational opportunities.

Yemen has the world's slowest internet speed with an average download speed of 0.53 megabytes per second, according to web analysis service Speedtest.

Internet penetration rates are low too. Just over a quarter of Yemenis have access to the internet, according to a 2022 report by online reference library DataReportal.

That is due to aging, unmaintained internet infrastructure that has been damaged by more than seven years of conflict, and a steep devaluation in the local currency that has severely curbed purchasing power in recent months.

Getting online is even more difficult in rural areas.

"I live in the countryside and the internet is so slow out there," said Bilal Sillal, a 25-year-old dermatology student at the University of Aden.

"It costs $10 for around 800 megabytes－that's not enough for me to watch a lecture and it's too expensive for me to get more."

Nasser Akil, another student at the university, said his professors used WhatsApp because it required less bandwidth.

He, along with Sillal, said they plan to seek work abroad after graduating, adding to the brain drain of their homeland.

"The world is online, and we're simply not," Akil said.

A report by think tank Arabia Brain Trust, due to be published this month, urges Yemeni authorities to license private companies to enter the market and repair hardware damaged by the war.

That could bring a much-needed boost to the economy, said internet researcher Nadia al-Sakkaf.

"We found that connecting 80 percent of Yemenis to the internet would increase GDP per capita by 1 percent every year," al-Sakkaf said.

Agencies Via Xinhua