Mark Rice-Oxley

With smartphone use and web penetration soaring, Africa is set for a tech revolution – but only if its infrastructure can support it.

By 2020 there will be more than 700 million smartphone connections in Africa – more than twice the projected number in North America and not far from the total in Europe, according to GSMA, an association of mobile phone operators. In Nigeria alone 16 smartphones are sold every minute, while mobile data traffic across Africa is set to increase 15-fold by 2020. Twenty per cent of the continent already have access to a mobile broadband connection, a figure predicted to triple in the next five years. The mobile industry will account for 8% of GDP by 2020 – double what it will be in the rest of the world. And internet penetration is rising faster than anywhere else as costs of data and devices fall.

[This is the first of a two-week series supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation]