Cape Town to Casablanca ...
The mobile revolution sweeping across Africa is changing the way many Africans learn, transact, shop, play and generally organise their communities. From Cape Town to Casablanca, everything is going mobile.
Two weeks apart as the World GSM 2015 Congress rounded up in Barcelona with great innovative ideas expounded for mobile technology, Africa was also at its Mobile Show at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg-South Africa and the Social Media Week in Lagos creating their own context. The GSM Congress’ 93,000 attendees and the 200 countries represented demonstrate the verve that mobile commands in today’s world. A revolution is truly unearthing across many African cities, inspiring initiatives are taking centre stage based on mobile technologies. New rounds of licensing in the last decade has opened new markets and cleared regulatory bottlenecks for mobile money operators, uniting telecom services with banking.
Of the earth’s 7.5billion people, 4.5billion have access to mobile devices. Two-thirds of the new additions to mobile technology markets will be from the developing continents of Asia and Africa. Africa is the new centre for mobile, its cities are ready for business, its rural communities are yearning for more and they will find the first connection with technology on a mobile phone. Today, OrangeMoney is working to connect Cote D’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal using the expected single currency in French West Africa. MTN MobileMoney in Cote D’Ivoire is also working on connecting to AirtelMoney in Burkina Faso. MTN, Orange and Airtel are working across many African countries to establish mMoney solutions, but that is not the big story.
The big story is that whoever you are in Africa; farmer, student, petty market trader, politician, and even Africa’s political institutions at the new swanky city-centres, you will have targeted solutions, and it will be mostly on mobile. Nigeria this week has just completed one of its freest and fairest elections in recent history and the credit mostly goes to e-voting on hand-held technologies. At this same time, under dingy lamps in Africa’s remotest towns; some obscure youths in a sweatshop on their last battery bar are developing locally relevant mobile apps, a farmer is using a mobile phone to find markets for farm produce as dawn breaks in another African town.
Africa’s mobile technology boom is a best-seller story any day. As late as the year 2005, many African countries telecoms were not liberalised; national PSTNs determined how phone services were used. Today the ITU statistics show all of Africa telecommunications are open to the free market forces except Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti.
Cameroon, Kenya, Gambia, Angola, Mauritania, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Gabon, and many other African countries were liberalised in the last 15 years, and all of them have had significant tele-density shifts from liberalization. As free markets take hold, prices go down and more people can now afford these mobile services. In Algeria, Mobile and fixed Telecoms contributed 5.5 billion within 5 years preceding 2011, 8% of Morocco’s GDP and 12.5% of Tunisia and Algeria generated over 300,000 jobs from liberalization.[1]
Africa’s Latecomer Technology Advantage.
The beauty of starting late is that African Telco’s leaped ahead into the latest BSS/BTS, CDMA and IP technology networks, as most did not inherit colloquial legacy switching networks and systems. The network rollout deployed in Africa is cutting edge Third Generation (3G), Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), and universal mobile telephone system (UMTS) compatible. With SIP soft-switches and other sexy technologies, mobile data packet switching comes easy as African Telcos jumped across many technology generations right up to frontier mobile systems. Interesting statistics show an above 60% of phones in most of Africa to be smartphones and as a result capable of mobile transactions.
Mobiles have come a long way since the days of Marty Cooper whose mobile phone weighed 2 kilograms and cost $3,995, through to the Nokia dominance of the 2000's. The contest between the iPhone and Samsung and runner ups like Sony, HTC, Motorola, Microsoft and LG is here, and this war is also very African. We have these powerful tools in our hands that are capable of changing how we buy, sell, play, learn and raise our families.
What are the Apps?
Many of the mobile applications being developed may never hit the bestseller list on the iStore or Google-Play. But, do they need to? Their object is to solve local problems and they do this pretty well.
While delivering a paper recently on “African Mobile Apps Revolution” I stated:
“… after we are done taking #Selfie's, checking out #Tumblr posts, #Gifs, #YouTube, #Vine Videos, #Facebook updates. Once we are over #Instagram pictures of our friends, we will start solving problems.”
Today, the process of solving problems has started in earnest. From education to environment, eBusiness to eBanking, e-Commerce to m-Commerce, e-payments to e-government, Agriculture to the Stock market, the applications revolution is seizing Africa. There are applications that solve many problems. Take a look at these agricultural apps that are all based on simple mobile technologies.
A KPMG article[2] cites Kenya as an example of what mMoney can be in the rest of Africa. Their over 19.5 million mobile subscribers have access to M-Pesa introduced by Safaricom and utilised by 10 Kenya Banks. M-Pesa is considered to be the foremost mobile payment system in the world and is spreading to the rest of East Africa. It is also the best model for collaboration between the banks, telecoms and business to bring consumers easy payments.
What are the Statistics?
From Vodafone Wallet in South Africa, to Tigo in Rwanda, Paga in Nigeria, Zoona in Zambia, Who are the beneficiaries of the mobile windfall in Africa? According to The Economist $24billion, more than the equivalent of half of Kenya’s GDP in 2013 was transacted on mobile phones. Nigeria’s Konga.com and Jumia.com are the obvious leaders in scale; behind them are Dealdey, Interswitch and Mall for Africa, most of their customers are from mobile devices.
In North Africa, Hasse is breaking new grounds in Sudan, Flous and Phone Cash are leading in Egypt, In South Africa the global brands, eBay and Amazon lead. South Africa has 135% mobile penetration, 90% own mobile phones in 2012, 0ver 60% buy online, the e-commerce spend is $326M, a substantial chunk via mobile apps like Pay4it, MonsterPay and everyPay. New mobile solutions and service platforms are being developed Wirecard, MFino and Liquid telecom.
“According to 2014 figures released by Informa Telecoms & Media, there were 778 million mobile subscribers in Africa at the end of June 2013. The firm predicts that this figure will reach one billion in 2015 and will exceed 1.2 billion by the end of 2018.“[3]
A billion-man market, without a traditional online purchasing experience points to a totally new value chain, the mobile market in Africa is set to grow exponentially. The obvious outcome of Africa’s Tech and Mobile revolution is the emergence of incubators, new apps, businesses and even investors. [4]. It is no more news that Africa growing middle-class have substantial buying power, and need to be taken seriously.
Any Problems?
As with every opportunity, so also the threat;
Infrastructure: Africa’s infrastructure woes remain at the top of every business conversation and it is true that Africa needs to do more. Gaps for investments exist for power turbines and grids, transportation systems and both rural and urban infrastructure. There is the need for business incubators to house the start-ups, network providers need to commit to increase wireless coverage, improve cell-site rollover, optimize GSM/CDMA and fixed networks.
New Technology: Mobile technology is new in most parts of the world as a result not very mature in security, interoperability, and apps sync across platforms. This remains a problem.
Regulation: The Legal regimes governing these pioneering technology is hardly mature enough to understand internet to adequately protect consumers who spend their monies on mobile. There is substantial amount of fear of lack of legal protection to ensure speedy resolution of conflicts.
Scale: In many African nations, mobile money switching is still done by systems that are not built to scale; switching will fail if deployed under pressure and if the need to grow comes too quickly.
Security: Security threats remain real, and knowledge sharing in on the increase globally about how to mitigate fraud and risk and some of the conference solutions and coding solutions are already being tested to help Africa, the creativity being displayed here is unprecedented.
What Africa Wants?
Some of Africa is at political crossroads, but not with technology. The technology road map of most African governments are clear. They want their young to learn and to connect with the technology centres of the world, which is happening many times by default driven through the entrepreneurial spirit of Africa’s new business moguls.
The growth of mobile is bridging the digital divide; the conversation is currently shifting from payment solutions, to micro-credit, empowerment to stirring up a residual economy.
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