More than half the population of Sub-Saharan Africa will be subscribed to a mobile service by 2025, according to the latest edition of the GSMA’s Mobile Economy report series.

The report titled "Mobile Economy: Sub-Saharan Africa 2018’, was compiled by GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the GSMA and published Tuesday ahead of the GSMA ‘Mobile 360 – Africa’ event set to held in Kigali this week.

The new report forecasts that there will be 634 million unique mobile subscribers across Sub-Saharan Africa by 2025, equivalent to 52 per cent of the population, up from 444 million (44 per cent) at the end of last year.

The report also projects that the mobile ecosystem will add more than $150 billion in value to Sub-Saharan Africa’s economy by 2022, equivalent to almost 8 per cent of regional GDP.

"For many citizens across the region, particularly those living in rural areas, a mobile phone is not just a communication device but also the primary channel for getting online and a vital tool for improving their lives,” John Giusti, Chief Regulatory Officer at the GSMA said in the statement.

He added, "more needs to be done to extend connectivity to the remaining unconnected and underserved populations across Sub-Sahara Africa, but this will require a focus on long-term industry sustainability that can only be achieved through investment-friendly policies and supportive regulatory frameworks.”

Mobile affordability challenge

Sub-Saharan Africa has been the world’s fastest-growing mobile region in recent years but subscriber growth is slowing as the industry faces challenges of affordability and a youthful population.

The region’s current mobile penetration rate (44 per cent of the population) is significantly below the global average of 66 per cent.

As of June last year, the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) released a report indicating that the total number of active mobile telephone subscriptions (90-days revenue generating subscribers) in Rwanda also decreased from over 8.4 million at the end of March to 8.37 million users at the end of April, showing a decline of 0.32 per cent.

As a result, the report said, the country’s mobile phones penetration rate went down slightly to 72.65 per cent from 72.88 per cent.

This, however, is a big decline in the number of active mobile phone subscribers compared to 79.2 per cent or 8.9 million subscribers in December 2016.  The penetration rate was calculated based on the projected ‘medium population’ of 2016, which is 11.5 million people, according to the RURA report.

Meanwhile, postpaid subscriptions rose from 115,692 at the end of March to 116,879 in April, while prepaid subscribers decreased to 8.25 million at the end of April from 8.28 million the previous month.

Further, according to the World Bank, around 40 per cent of the population in the region are under the age of 16, a demographic segment that has significantly lower levels of mobile ownership than the population as a whole.

However, despite these challenges, smartphone adoption continues to increase rapidly thanks to lower device costs, which is serving to accelerate migration to 3G/4G mobile broadband networks and services.

Today’s report predicts that mobile broadband will account for 87 per cent of mobile connections[iin Sub-Saharan Africa by 2025, up from 38 per cent in 2017. Moreover, nearly 300 million new subscribers are expected to use their devices to access mobile internet services over the next seven years.

According to the GSMA survey, mobile technologies and services accounted for 7.1 per cent of GDP across Sub-Saharan Africa, a contribution that amounted to $110 billion of economic value added, Last year.

"By 2022, the region’s mobile economy is forecast to generate more than $150 billion (7.9 per cent of GDP) of economic value as countries continue to benefit from improvements in productivity and efficiency, particularly due to the increase in mobile internet adoption,” the GSMA’s Mobile Economy report series states.

The region’s mobile ecosystem also supported 3 million jobs in 2017 and contributed almost $14 billion to the funding of the public sector in the form of general taxation as well as sector-specific levies on the consumption of mobile services.