Mobile technology + cellphone customer = African success

Details: Michael Schwartz; Category: Trends & Forecasts; 14 May 2006; 11350 views

Good news and Africa seldom go together. Let's be blunt about it. It may be a case of "Bad news alone sells newspapers" but on the whole there is little, rightly or wrongly, to be happy about. And then...

Africa is no absentee from success

And then, here we are at Developing Telecoms, receiving news from all over the emerging markets. And in a success story, Africa is no absentee. We have in the last few weeks reported on Cameroon's fibre-optic backbone, snaking its way across the country side-by-side with the country's oil-pipeline. We have reported on marketing and pricing problems with the East African submarine cable (EASSy) but when it comes down to the crunch this is a wonderful opportunity for millions of African citizens to enjoy the benefits of communication. We have even published a BBC report about how communications can flourish in a country where government doesn't even flourish at all.

And so we can report a long-overdue success from Africa. Millions of cellphones are to be found from the Maghreb to Cape Town, either reflecting a new-found prosperity on the Continent or, as we suspect, having helped to create that same prosperity through clear and direct communication. The two questions that spring to mind are how did it happen and what will happen now?

In the bad old days...

Well, it is a good idea to look back at how things used to be done (and still are in some areas). One upon a time a government might take its mind off war and corruption and consider building a telecom network for its country. There would a post office, a telegram office and a certain amount of copper to establish a fixed line.

And there began the problems. In one (non-African) country, the Philippines, you got a telephone if you were the nephew of the government minister. You waited a long time to get even that - and then there was no-one to contact. The whole system stank of corruption. No competition meant awful management. Lack of revenue meant no money for repairs or new infrastructure. Add the odd civil war, or robber stealing the cable, and you had a circle more vicious than most.

In fact, stability is far more common now in Africa than it has been for decades. There has been a feeling that things can not continue as they have been - and the end of the Cold War has meant that one of the two Super-Powers using Africa as a battlefield by proxy is no longer there.

The window of opportunity

Hence a window of opportunity. Foreign money and technology were waiting. As our pages show they continue to arrive.

Mobile is the key, and here ITU statistics are especially illuminating. The number of mobile subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa in 1996 (and excluding South Africa) was nil. As of early 2005, it was 82 million. Every year mobile subscribers in Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania can ring four times as many subscribers to tell them about the organic growth they are enjoying.

Further North, butting up to the Sahara, lies Nigeria: 140 million people and just 0.5 million land-line connections. Or, from the mobile perspective, 19 million Nigerian subscribers since the start of the 21st century and maybe as many as 50 million by the end of its first decade.

Mobile is winning

Quite simply, fixed line technology has been bypassed. The Developing Telecoms team was amazed to meet one company which was only interested in fixed-line - despite mobile's proven achievement. If the company had been involved in both technologies, ie, keeping its hand in with fixed-line, we could have understood this. To be exclusively oriented to fixed-line makes no sense.

The Continent mercilessly described as 'Dark' has been illuminated by the power of the human voice and technological genius. What is more, there appears to be an absence of the greed associated with the development of the Middle East in the 1970s ,when hotel rooms were so full that business executives used to camp out in hotel reception areas.