While Africa is confronted with the urgency to provide its citizens with the basic requirements of life such as peace, food, education, health, shelter, safe drinking water, etc., the rest of the world and the developed nations in particular are fast heading towards a globally networked information economy. This raises questions about what the information economy holds for Africa and specifically what opportunities, challenges and impacts it may have. This paper attempts to provide an overview of the current state of affairs of the information economy in Africa by implementing a generic conceptual framework that includes ICT hardware, software and services, informatization and e‐commerce. The paper also identifies the basic challenges that Africa faces in developing and benefiting from the information economy.