Africa is home to the birthplace of civilization, yet years after those events, Africa is still playing catch-up in many areas. Africa is home to thirty-three of the 48 United Nations’ least developed countries and also home to some of the world’s poorest countries. These are some of the well-known facts about the “Dark Continent”. In 2020, Africa has become home to the youngest population in the world with a reported median age of 19.7 according to World Meters. This group of promising young people has begun to show how their embrace of affordable technology is transforming the continent into a “developed” region.
While more than 70 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans do not have a bank account, more than 75 percent own a SIM card, this means that more than 70 percent of the population doesn’t have access to a bank but they have access to a mobile phone (MOURDOUKOUTAS, 2017). This became a possibility because of the increasing amount of affordable mobile phone devices that have been coming in from China. Africa has become some sort of dumping place for Chinese goods that aren’t fit for the world’s middle-class market. Phones are sold for as cheap as $15. Despite the dark circumstances of the arrival of these devices, they are helping solve so many problems. In 2008 a Kenyan telecommunication company found a way to use mobile phone SIM cards as financial accounts. Other telecommunication companies throughout the continent also embraced this technology (think Venmo or Cashapp on regular internet-free phones). People do not need to get validated by banks anymore before opening accounts, they just need the same SIM card that they use in their phones for everyday communication. As a result, telecommunication companies have become the new financial services. because. Insurance companies also saw potential in using mobile phones and now an uninsured mother of three who lives 10 kilometers away from the closest insurance company, doesn’t need to leave her house to get signed up. Because of the lack of a credit system in almost all African countries, the majority of people could not benefit from loans and credit benefits like other countries do. Banks now use people’s mobile phone financial transactions to build credit reports and history for its potential clients and as a result, people are finally getting access to capital that they never had (MOURDOUKOUTAS, 2017). Most Africans use their mobile phones as the primary source of an internet connection. This increase in internet penetration is giving kids access to the same quality material and education that kids in the developed countries of the world are receiving. These are just a few of the many benefits that mobile phone devices are bringing to the continent.
All of Africa’s 54 countries have their own struggles, cultures, governments, and way of life but the use of mobile phones has been the same throughout the continent. With more than 700 million phone owners, Africa is not the world’s fastest-growing mobile market. (MOURDOUKOUTAS, 2017). We are finally seeing the continent move forward using the same tool. I couldn’t be happier to be African right now.
References
MOURDOUKOUTAS, ELENI. July 2017, www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/may-july-2017/africa’s-digital-rise-hooked-innovation.
WORLD METERS. APRIL 2020, www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-population/
Hey Alexis,
Thank you for responding to my post about technology’s impact in Africa. Thanks for sharing the additional source from PEW Research. I would like to point out that the article was written 6 years ago which is a significant time in regard to the growth or decline of mobile use. To answer your question, I don’t think that the market is unfair or people are being ripped off because older people don’t use their devices for photography like younger people. Elderly people in Africa and I’d like to think throughout the world too, are generally not as tech-savvy as younger people. This may be one of the reasons for the low number of recreational cell phone use in comparison to younger people. I would really be interested to see where that number stands 6 years later(today). It is a pretty interesting statistic.
Hey Nicole,
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my blog post. I really like your reminder that most African nations were born or got their independence after 1960. If you consider the short amount of time that we have had to build our nations plus the civil wars and the corruption that still troubles our continent, I feel surprised at how some countries are still moving forwards towards becoming better. Africa was set up to fail in so many ways and colonial media as you stated was one of the tools responsible for that. To add to my original blog post as a response to your comments about the infrastructure, telecom companies have really made an effort to provide Africa with mobile access with some of the cheapest data rates in the world. This pandemic, I have witnessed how this continent has grown from radio use to internet use. While having internet access to be able to work from home is still a luxury that many cannot afford, the number of people who can afford has visibly gone up. If this pandemic was to hit just 5 years ago, we would barely have people work from home. These really are interesting times and Its interesting to see how so many countries including those in Africa, use technology to deal with the issue.
This post was incredibly eye opening because of how far Africa has come, however, from the outside looking in we can’t help but feel grateful that most of us have been priviledged to have technology as an essential. During this pandemic, the world quickly learned what was considered essential and what was capable of being done at home. Telecommunications in America has become a public utiliy in this present day. On the other side of the world it is luxury not yet a commodity.
Some things to keep in mind to further appreciate Africa’s recent achievement; most of the new nations of Africa were born after 1960. African history is a record of colonialism, primarily by the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, and the early print media were created to serve the colonists, not the native population. Their print media has always been an opinion press. Advocacy journalism comes naturally to them. To the extent that they feel a need for hard news, that need is satisfied by the minimal coverage of the mass media, especially radio. African culture is very diverse, with an estimated 800 to 2,000 language dialects, making it impossible to cre- ate a mass circulation newspaper that can appeal to a wide readership. Radio has also been a very important medium in Africa. One reason for radio’s dominance over print is that literacy rates are lower in Africa than in many other regions of the world. Radio is also very accessible and the cheapest way for people to follow the news. A relatively small percentage of the African public owns a TV set, and less than 5 percent of Africa’s pop- ulation has access to the Internet. Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the [African] continent. A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems. Media in the region are concentrated in urban areas, although the growing availability of cellular signals throughout Africa has the potential to expand communi- cations rapidly, once the political unrest subsides. (Biagi, 2017).
Reference
Biagi, S. (2017). Media/Impact: An Introduction to Mass Media (12th ed.). Cengage Learning.
This blog was very interesting. One aspect that stood out to me was the notion that While more than 70 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans do not have a bank account, more than 75 percent own a SIM card but own a cell phone. To take it one step further, 65% of mobile owners ages 18 to 34 in Ghana say they use their device to send text messages, while only 34% of those 35 and older do this. Similarly, 62% of young, cell-owning Ghanaians say they take pictures or video with their phones, but only 33% among the older generations do (“Cell Phones in Africa: Communication Lifeline”, 2019). I cant help to wonder if the market is fair. In other words, are they being “ripped off” because of the financial circumstances. Nonetheless, mobile telephony’s impact in the region remains at an early stage and is always worth reevaluating.
Reference
Cell Phones in Africa: Communication Lifeline. (2019, December 30). Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2015/04/15/cell-phones-in-africa-communication-lifeline/