K. A. PANZEREV Candidate of Philological Sciences Keywords: information society, information technologies, Tropical African countries Today, the world is entering a new era in which information and knowledge objectively acquire a decisive role in the socio-economic development of modern society. A fundamentally new way of social relations that is being formed today is usually called information, post-industrial or network, and any state strives to build it. In this article, the author comprehends the key problems of the development of the information society in the countries of Tropical Africa, which have declared the creation of appropriate new technologies as one of the main national priorities. The Internet began to reach Africa in the mid-1990s, but it did not really develop until the beginning of the new millennium. In 2000-2010, the countries of Tropical Africa achieved some success in this direction. INFORMATION SOCIETY IN AFRICA: MYTH OR REALITY? From our point of view, the most interesting example is that of Nigeria. By mid-2001, there were only 400,000 fixed-line telephone lines and 25,000 analog mobile lines in the country. This meant that in one of the most populous countries in Africa, only a few people (only 0.4% of the population) used telephone service. Mobile communications were virtually unknown in Nigeria at that time. The liberalization of the Nigerian information and telecommunications market was declared in 2000. As a result, in a very short period of time, a large number of enterprises providing telecommunications services have appeared in Nigeria. In 2005-2010, the country managed to achieve significant progress in the development of information technologies and became a regional leader in this area. This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that in Nigeria, as in a number of other countries in Tropical Africa, the principle of public/private partnership was proclaimed, which brought noticeable results. The essence of such a partnership is ... Read more