In Africa, more people have access to mobile devices than clean water.
"A lot of the innovation coming out of Africa is borne out of necessity," stated Mark McCallum, CTO, director and head of global services at Orange Business Services in sub-Saharan Africa. McCallum was speaking at the GIL 2015 Africa event held at The Table Bay Hotel in Cape Town today.
This presents a number of challenges but also a variety of opportunities.
When we look at the digital landscape in Africa, we see that the number of active Internet users is well below the global average - 26% in Africa versus 42% globally. There are over a billion people living in Africa, 298 million of which are active Internet users.
McCallum mentioned how access to the Internet has a direct positive impact on GDP. Nineteen of the 23 poorest countries in the world are in Africa but six out of the 13 fastest-growing economies can also be found on the African continent. "What this means is that there is a massive digital divide and closing this divide is not going to happen via traditional IT."
The African story is about mobile, he noted. "If we look at mobile connections, 80% of Africans are connecting to the Internet using mobile devices."
Highlighting that there are huge disparities in terms of connectivity, he stressed that organisations looking to bring digital to Africa must focus on mobile strategies and should be developing ways to level the playing field across the continent. "There are major contradictions in Africa. Seventy-nine-percent mobile penetration across the continent sounds like a great number but this is averaging out." Of this figure, only 18% of these devices are smartphones or are Internet-enabled, which impacts on how organisations bring services to consumers.
For McCallum, one also needs to look at digitising Africa from a language perspective, given the fact that the continent has so many unique languages and dialects. "Major social networking sites can create a Pirate language but we don't have the languages that are required to adequately deliver services to people in Africa," he noted.
This is where the challenges and opportunities come in, said McCallum, noting it all comes down to meeting needs at a reasonable cost. And the current scenario just isn't working, he added. The cheapest smartphone retails for roughly $60 and the average per capita income in the poorest country in the world, the DRC, is just $394 per year. "If that household wanted to join the mobile world, they would have to spend 16% of their annual income to do so."
Share