August 25, 2005
Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century
Africa is the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. From 1999 through 2004, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million, from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent. South Africa, the continent's richest nation, accounted for one-fifth of that growth, according to The New York Times.
"Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of just 34 percent in that period.
Africa's cellphone boom has taken the industry by surprise. Africans have never been rabid telephone users; even Mongolians have twice as many land lines per person. And with most Africans living on $2 a day or less, they were supposed to be too poor to justify corporate investments in cellular networks far outside the more prosperous cities and towns.
But when African nations began to privatize their telephone monopolies in the mid-1990's, and fiercely competitive operators began to sell air time in smaller, cheaper units, cellphone use exploded.
It turned out that Africans had never been big phone users because nobody had given them the chance.
One in 11 Africans is now a mobile subscriber."
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