If you had to guess where on Earth there are more cell phone users than the U.S. or E.U., you might be forgiven for thinking of China or India and not Africa.
Each with over a billion people, China and India are not only far more populous than the U.S. or the E.U, but both have experienced sustained economic growth over many years.
Africa’s population tops 900 million and, with a decade of economic growth having enriched the continent’s people, cell phone ownership and use have skyrocketed. This is unsurprising. Given the chance, people everywhere have flocked to mobile devices. The degree to which the continent’s traditional telecoms infrastructure – copper and fiber-optic landlines – have languished for decades due to underinvestment and government meddling means that wireless devices are the first exposure for many to modern, relatively inexpensive telecommunications.
In many respects wireless communications and cellphones are seemingly tailor-made for Africa. Competition is keen between mobile providers. With no need to invest in expensive landline networks and few such networks to defend – as in the developed world where providers such as AT&T still ask whether you want a home landline phone when you order service – providers in Africa can simply pop up cell towers, switch on service, and watch their businesses grow.
It is not quite that easy, of course, but Africans have taken to handheld devices in droves. Since 2000, when there were 16 million cell phone subscriptions on the continent, use has exploded to more than 630 million – more than the total population of the U.S. and the E.U. This forty-fold growth has made Africa the second-largest growth market for mobile communications services and devices after South Asia.
This lightning-quick, widespread adoption of mobile technology has dramatically transformed life for many. No longer are communications choked by shoddy infrastructure that leaves whole regions and communities – urban and rural alike – effectively cut off from the modern world.
Today, even the most isolated and poorest village in Africa has someone who has a cell phone and a subscription, which is often the basis of a phone-rental business. For a fee, villagers can contact relatives, share news with others, check current market prices for the agricultural commodities grown by the village’s farmers, and keep up with the rest of the world.
Internet access is not far behind with new connections to the rest of the world being forged and current ones expanded. Within the past six years, African bandwidth has increased 20-fold due to the addition of 68,000 kilometers of submarine cable and the addition 615,000 kilometers of national network links. This has meant a transformation in the way the continent’s people do business -not just with one another, but with the rest of the world.
In agriculture – still Africa’s largest economic sector – the telecoms revolution is not just allowing farmers to follow price in real time – vital in deciding when and how much of their produce to sell to local merchants. It is also allowing the use of RFID tagging technology to track livestock in Botswana – a major producer of cattle – as well as allowing Egyptian farmers to monitor water usage in that dusty, water-starved country.
In other areas of the economy, the telecoms revolution is also having an important impact. In Kenya, for instance, active bank accounts have increased by four-fold due to the introduction and quick adoption of M-PESA, a mobile money-transfer and banking service in that country. With access to a fuller range of financial services through their M-PESA accounts, Kenyans can now for the first time use savings and checking accounts as well as establish and make claims on credit. So successful have services like this become that they have been adopted all across the continent. Indeed, it is in the realm of finance that the mobile revolution might eventually make itself most felt and it is in Africa that cash as a physical entity may disappear first.
But other areas are benefiting, too. Education can be improved by providing high-quality lessons online or by connecting teachers with students or students with the wealth of information available online. Likewise health can be improved even in the case of HIV infection through the use of mobile applications and services that inform patients of the need to keep to a mediation schedule or where to receive treatment.
The African telecoms revolution is also creating a feedback loop wherein Africans are tailoring the technology for their own use. The dual-use SIM card, for instance, was pioneered in Africa, as was the use of mobile devices for remittance payments from abroad. Finally, technology hubs – Africa’s versions of Silicon Valley – are popping up in the form of iHub and NaiLab in Kenya, Hive CoLab and AppLab in Uganda, Activspaces in Cameroon, BantaLabs in Senegal, Kinu in Tanzania or infoDev’s mLabs in Kenya and South Africa.
Lest anyone think that with all this good news the communications revolution is losing steam in Africa due to market saturation, experts estimate that only 1 in 3 Africans own a cell phone. Clearly, there is still yet room for major expansion in the field of Internet service and mobile telephony provision for investors to get in on.
Jeffrey Cavanaugh holds a Ph.D in political science with a specialization in international relations from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Formerly an assistant professor of political science and public administration at Mississippi State University, he writes on global affairs and international economics for AFK Insider, Mint Press News and BAM South.
