Why half of Africans still don’t have mobile phones

By J.R.

JUMP onto the back of a motorcycle taxi almost anywhere between Nigeria and Kenya and the odds are that your driver will be wearing a high-visibility vest carrying the logo of a mobile telephone company. The phones themselves are even more ubiquitous. By the end of this year there will probably be close to 1bn active subscriptions for mobile phones across the continent, almost one for each of 1.2bn people living in Africa. That is a stupendous jump from fewer than 100m in 2005. Yet a slightly closer look shows that although a very large number of Africans have several active phone numbers (they switch SIM cards to get better deals if travelling, calling abroad or those on other networks) more than 50% of people have none at all. Why is it that despite such rapid growth in the mobile phone industry elsewhere in the world, more than half of Africans still can’t phone home?