Africa's Mobile Phone Boom, By the Numbers (2013)

By 2013, Africa had become one of the fastest-growing mobile phone markets in the world, a transformation that took roughly a decade to unfold. Industry trackers including the GSMA and Informa Telecoms & Media estimated the continent had reached around 780 million mobile subscriptions, up from under 400 million just five years earlier, growth that comfortably outpaced the global average of around 10 percent a year with African connection growth running closer to 17 to 18 percent annually through 2012. That put Africa behind only two other markets worldwide in raw subscription volume: the broader Asia Pacific region, with roughly 1.28 billion subscriptions, and China alone, with about 1.17 billion, an eye-catching ranking given that Africa’s total population and GDP were both far smaller than either comparison group.

Nigeria and South Africa anchored the continent’s growth as its two largest individual markets. Nigeria’s telecoms regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission, reported the country had grown to roughly 181 million connected mobile lines by 2013, though a large share of those were inactive or duplicate SIM registrations; the NCC’s own active-line figures for the same period sat closer to 120 million, reflecting a market where many subscribers carried multiple SIM cards to take advantage of competing carriers’ promotional rates. That active-subscriber base still made Nigeria the single largest mobile market on the continent by user count, a position tied directly to its status as Africa’s most populous country. South Africa, with a far smaller population but higher per-capita income and earlier network buildout dating to the 1990s, remained the continent’s other dominant market and a hub for major regional carriers including MTN and Vodacom, both of which had expanded operations into dozens of other African countries by the early 2010s.

The scale of the shift mattered well beyond subscriber counts. Mobile networks became, in large parts of Africa, the primary or only telecommunications infrastructure available, leapfrogging the fixed-line landline networks that never reached most of the continent’s rural population. The GSMA calculated that the mobile industry contributed roughly 5.4 percent of regional GDP by 2013, equivalent to about $75 billion, a figure that captured not just carrier revenue but the broader economy of mobile money services, device retail, and small businesses built around phone-based commerce. Kenya’s M-Pesa mobile money platform, launched in 2007, had already become the most cited example of this effect by 2013, demonstrating that phones could substitute for banking infrastructure that much of the continent’s population had never had access to.

Growth did not stop at the 780 million mark. The GSMA’s subsequent forecasts projected Sub-Saharan Africa alone would surpass half a billion unique mobile subscribers, a distinct measure from total connections that counts individual people rather than SIM cards, by the end of the decade, and continent-wide connections were projected to cross the billion mark by around 2015. Data usage followed an even steeper curve: mobile data traffic across Sub-Saharan Africa, still a modest 37,500 terabytes per month in 2013, was forecast to grow twentyfold by 2019 as networks upgraded from 2G to 3G and, later, 4G, and smartphone prices fell enough to reach a mass market that had first come online through basic feature phones.