The Power of a Mobile Phone in Africa

Africa has been the fastest-growing mobile market in the world during the past five years. With mobile technology and mobile phones reshaping the future of the African continent, millions of Africans rely on they mobiles phone daily not only for communication but to run their day-to-day lives.

It is easy to glaze over the impact of the mobile phone in Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. It seems already well-established by all those presentations you’ve probably seen showing farmers getting their produce to the market on time thanks to SMS and a 2G Nokia phone.

Between now and 2023, mobile subscriptions in the region are predicted to grow by an average of 6% a year to just under 1 billion from 700 million today, .

These big numbers may feel inevitable. But size matters and not just because telecoms suppliers can sell more kit to mobile operators. Nearly every other story we cover in Africa is determined or affected by the role of mobile telephony.

Take Kenya, where this week the opposition leader called on supporters to protest the outcome of the last presidential election by boycotting the services of a few key companies including Safaricom. In effect, this was also a call to boycott M-Pesa, the world’s leading mobile money service, controlled by Safaricom. Billions of dollars, equivalent to nearly half of Kenya’s GDP, flow over M-Pesa every year. A comprehensive boycott of the service is a lot easier said than done, even the opposition itself found this.

Somaliland, which is holding elections, decided to block Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and other social media platforms because it fears the scourge of “fake news.” The self-declared country joins nearly 20 African countries that have done this since 2016, as we’ve reported.

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, the recently released POTRAZ report also highlighted a high usage in data over voice with nearly half of all internet traffic going to WhatsApp. On a separate incident the Zimbabwean Government last month blamed “economic saboteurs” for spreading rumors online (98% of all traffic is mobile).

Conclusively, , there will be more, not less, overreaction and hand-wringing as the availability of mobile phones and mobile internet in Sub-Saharan Africa expands. We’re still very much at the beginning of mobile’s impact.