Pledges to the Connect Rwanda challenge have so far hit an impressive 30,000 smartphones. The organisers should consider giving some of them to the teenagers.

I was intrigued to find out the potential impact of the smartphones already in our teens’ hands after reading the recent article, "Teenagers are rewriting the rules of the news”, in The Economist.

The magazine observed how it can be tempting to dismiss teenagers’ news-consumption habits. Most cannot vote, have limited spending power and are probably incapable of finding El Salvador on a map.

Such sneers, it cautioned, are misplaced. A third of the planet is under 20. More than half the world is now connected to the internet. The young are a proxy for the future.

And they are already having some impact. It quotes the Amazon fires that, by August this year, anyone with an Instagram account anywhere in the world, the vast majority being the youth, was aware of it. It suggests the young people played some role in forcing mainstream Western media to pick up on it.

Politicians, policymakers and media executives are urged to pay attention: how news is made, spread and consumed by teenagers today will determine what happens to their countries and businesses tomorrow.

Social media is a key feature of teenagers’ news consumption. "News” now comes not only from accounts and outlets dedicated to the dissemination of journalism, but could be anything from a meme to the opinion of an online personality, such as PewDiePie, the world’s most influential YouTuber, who mostly makes silly videos about video games and online culture.

He has a following of 102 million subscribers. The combined print and digital circulation of every newspaper in America is about 30m. These include readers in Africa.

Another measure why teens should be taken into consideration is their declining consumption. Between 2009 and 2018 the share of teenagers who read newspapers declined from around 60 per cent to close to 20 per cent. These figures, The Economist quotes the Programme for International Student Assessment (pisa), an educational league table of 15- and 16-year-olds in the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries.

The trend is the same in India, including among the Arabs and South Koreans and elsewhere.

Though such disaggregated research singling teenagers’ news consumption is yet available in Africa, the declining trend of reading newspapers is evident among the millennials.

A 2017 GeoPoll survey of the 18-35 year-olds in five African countries finds that over 60 per cent of the African millennials using social media—particularly Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter—as their primary source of information. Television comes a distant second at 25 per cent with newspapers being the least important source at only 6 per cent.

The trend is, therefore, global. Except that it is doubtful African teens will be rewriting the rules of the news just yet.

Consider that, of the 459 million mobile phones in Sub-Saharan Africa, only 11 per cent (50.5 million people) are connected to social media. Compare this to around 79 per cent in America.

Given that dismal percentage of penetration, it is doubtful many of the teenagers in our streets with smartphones can afford social media.

There is also the challenge of gender disparity. Boys are nearly twice as likely to own a smartphone compared to girls in Africa.

Because of this, more than half of the girls in much of Africa borrow a phone to communicate, compared to only 28 per cent of boys. Mothers and older sisters are the main source of a phone, while in Nigeria it is often the generosity of the male family members that helped girls. This is according to the survey report "Real Girls, Real Lives, Connected” that also included Rwanda.

This limited access to phones means that usage also differs significantly from boys, keeping girls from the life-changing technologies mobile phones now offer. Where boys accessed WhatsApp, YouTube, used the internet to find work or read the news, girls cellphone usage was limited to calls or sending texts to keep in touch with family and friends as noted by Quartz.

Therefore, while the mobile phone has had tremendous impact in economic development including employment of youth, it will be a while before the African teenagers can be a force to influence policy and business in the continent.

The Economist observes that the teenagers are also getting their news from other young people who largely express their personal opinions and are barely any better informed than themselves. We will have to deal with this, including with the quality of news and information the teens are receiving from influencers such as PewDiePie.

Despite the challenges, they are teething problems and nobody is suggesting the smartphones should be kept out of teenage hands. That would be abominable given their empowering role even in education.

The Connect Rwanda campaign should gift some of the smartphones to teenagers. And remember the girls.

The views expressed in this article are of the author.