Universal Access Index assessment and appropriate optimization strategy

International audience Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are the basis of globalization evolution. In Africa, particularly, the lightning mobile telephony evolution marked by the implementation of wide-band infrastructures has promoted the evolution of ICT in urban areas. It is important, on the other hand, to underline that this evolution in a country is not observed in a proportional way among the various urban and rural areas. In this context, an overall approach of assessment and optimization of the universal access service index in a country, called Universal Access Index, is proposed in this paper. The optimization approach suggested is based on the implementation of corrective actions related to the Universal Service Access Fund and takes into account the intrinsic technical–economic constraints in every area. To assimilate the updated definition of the International Telecommunications Union on the universal access, two significant indicators representing the voice services and data services were integrated in the modelling approach. This approach is applied to a real case study of the state of Ouaddaï in Chad which makes it possible to highlight its relative simplicity of implementation.