Telecoms call for African govts to update regulations
Sunday July 23 2017
Smartphone connections in sub-Saharan Africa have doubled over the past two years to nearly 200 million. PHOT FILE | NMG
Telecom operators in Africa complain of outdated regulation, which is giving a lot away and not adapting quickly enough to the pace of the industry, a situation they say is affecting operations.
Although the industry has registered commendable growth over the past few years, experts say a lot more would have been achieved if there was stable and predictable regulation.
“The industry gets affected when governments change goal posts,” said Mats Granryd, the director-general of Global Systems for Mobile Association (GSMA) at the just concluded Mobile 360 conference in Dar es Salaam.
The companies also called for fairer tax regimes for the mobile and telecom industry given that the industry is creating a lot of value for economies through innovation across the telecommunication and mobile financial services ecosystem.
Mobile technologies and services generated $110 billion of economic value to sub-Saharan countries, an equivalent of 7.7 per cent of GDP in one year, with contribution expected to rise to $142 billion and 8.6 per cent of GDP by 2020, according to the latest GSMA mobile economy report.
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Experts said an example of poor regulation is when some players especially over-the-top firms (OTT’s) like WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media platforms bypass taxation yet they are increasingly becoming big in offering SMS and voice services.
At the end of 2016, there were 420 million unique mobile subscribers in sub-Saharan Africa, which is equivalent to a penetration rate of 43 per cent and the region continues to grow faster than any other.
The compound annual growth rate of 6.1 per cent over the five years to 2020 is around 50 per cent higher than the global average.
The total number of SIM connections in the region reached 731 million at the end of 2016, and will rise to nearly one billion by 2020.
Less than a fifth of those below 16 years (who account for more than 40 per cent of the population in most countries in the region) have a mobile subscription. However, women were 17 per cent less likely than men to own a mobile phone in 2016.
The number of mobile broadband connections are expected to reach half a billion by 2020, more than double the number at the end of 2016, and will account for nearly two thirds of total connections in the region.
Smartphone connections in sub-Saharan Africa have doubled over the past two years to nearly 200 million, accounting for a quarter of mobile connections in 2016.
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Key factors supporting the growth of smartphone adoption in the region include the increasing affordability of new devices and a growing market for second-hand devices.
This trend, along with the uptake of mobile broadband services, is driving demand for digital content and continues to drive mobile data traffic.
Traffic is forecast to grow 12-fold across Africa as a whole over the next five years.
The mobile ecosystem was reported to support about 3.5 million jobs in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016.
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In addition to the mobile sector’s impact on the economy and labour market, it makes a substantial contribution to the funding of the public sector, with $13 billion raised in 2016 in the form of taxation, according to the latest mobile economy report.
Around 270 million people in the region access the Internet through mobile devices, while the number of registered mobile money accounts reached 280 million as of March.