Every year, the GSMA drops its Mobile Economy report like a report card for the world’s telecoms industry. And every year, Africa gets a section that mixes genuine excitement with quietly sobering numbers. This week on #TechTalkThursday, we did something different: we placed the 2025 and 2026 editions side by side, zeroed in on Sub-Saharan Africa and MENA, and asked the only question that matters: are things actually getting better?
The short answer: in some areas, yes. In others, Africa is running hard just to stay in place. Here is the full breakdown.
“Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to account for nearly a quarter of all new mobile internet subscribers globally between 2025 and 2030 — yet it still has the lowest smartphone adoption rate of any region on Earth.”
We ran the same exercise on the 2024 vs 2025 reports. Read that checkpoint here → https://techafricanews.com/2025/09/18/65-of-sub-saharan-africa-are-still-offline-despite-coverage-a-look-at-the-connectivity-paradox/
Subscriber Growth: The Good News First
The headline numbers show momentum. Sub-Saharan Africa’s subscriber penetration stood at 46% in 2024, with a forecast of 55% by 2030. Both reports agree on this trajectory, which is itself a data point, growth is happening, but it is incremental, not explosive.
Nigeria stands out as a bright spot. The 2025 report projects 32 million new mobile internet subscribers for the country between 2025 and 2030, making it the fourth-largest contributor to global subscriber growth, behind only India, Indonesia, and China. Ethiopia (19 million), Angola (18 million), DR Congo (15 million), and Tanzania (11 million) also feature in the global top 15. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is expected to account for nearly a quarter of all new mobile internet subscribers worldwide this decade.
That is the continent coming online. The question is what happens when people get there.
The Usage Gap: Africa’s Most Urgent Problem
Of all the statistics in both reports, this one deserves the most attention.
The 2026 report puts Africa’s usage gap, the share of people covered by mobile broadband who still don’t use the internet, at 63%. Let that land. Nearly two-thirds of Africans who could get online are not doing so. Not because there is no signal, but because of cost, literacy, relevance, and safety concerns.
Africa now accounts for 33% of the world’s unconnected population. This is a demand-side crisis. More towers will not fix it.
“63% of people covered by mobile broadband in Sub-Saharan Africa still do not use the internet. More towers will not fix this.”
Smartphones: The Wall That Will Not Move
The 2026 report identifies smartphone affordability as Africa’s single most stubborn structural barrier. A 4G-capable device in Sub-Saharan Africa costs around 26% of monthly GDP per capita — compared to 16% across all other low- and middle-income countries. That figure has not changed between reports.
Smartphone adoption sits at 54% for Sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, forecast to reach 81% by 2030. That is a promising trajectory on paper, but it depends almost entirely on device prices falling. The GSMA Handset Affordability Coalition, which includes Airtel, MTN, Orange, and Vodacom among others, has been working on minimum specs for affordable 4G handsets since 2024. The data said the wall had not cracked. Then, yesterday at MWC Barcelona, something shifted.
On 3 March 2026, the GSMA announced that six African countries — DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda — have been identified for pilot deployments of $40 entry-level 4G smartphones later this year. A formal MoU was signed between the GSMA, the G6 group of African operators, and OEM partners, with at least eight device manufacturers already in commercial negotiations. The pilots build directly on minimum specifications unveiled at MWC Kigali in 2025 and represent the first time industry alignment has translated into concrete, on-the-ground action.
There is a catch. Rising global memory prices are making the $30–$40 price point increasingly difficult to hit and the GSMA is openly calling on governments to remove taxes and import duties on entry-level devices to bridge the gap. Without that policy support, the pilots risk stalling before they scale. But for the first time in this story, the wall has a door.
“In a global context of rising memory costs, governments have an important role in bridging the usage gap. Removing taxes and import duties on entry-level 4G smartphones will be critical to achieving scale.”
–Vivek Badrinath, Director General, GSMA
5G: Modest Upgrade, Still Trailing Every Other Region
This is where the 2026 report is at least marginally more optimistic. The 2025 edition projected Sub-Saharan Africa at 17% 5G adoption by 2030, dead last globally. The 2026 report nudges that to 21%, equivalent to 247 million connections, partly reflecting new spectrum licences issued across the continent including Egypt’s October 2024 5G awards.
But context matters. By 2030, Latin America is forecast at 53%, Eurasia at 41%, the rest of MENA at 43%. Africa’s improvement is real; the gap is still widening.
The continent’s current technology mix tells the fuller story: 4G leads at 49% of connections, 3G still accounts for 38%, and 2G sits at 3%. Legacy network dependence is not a historical footnote; it is today’s reality for hundreds of millions of users.
The Economic Upside Is Real
Both reports agree on the macro prize. Mobile technologies globally contribute $6.5 trillion to GDP in 2024, rising to nearly $11 trillion by 2030. LMICs, Africa’s primary classification, are expected to capture a growing share of those benefits as the decade progresses.
But the productivity gains that drive most of that value depend on enterprises actually adopting advanced digital technologies. And enterprise digitisation in Africa is, with notable exceptions, still early-stage. The economic opportunity is not going anywhere. Whether Africa captures it depends on solving the exact problems both reports keep identifying.
One practical model worth watching: Vodacom and Orange’s joint plan to build up to 2,000 solar-powered base stations across rural DRC. Shared infrastructure, renewable energy, 2G and 4G coverage in areas traditional economics would never reach. That is the blueprint, the question is how fast it can scale.
The Verdict
Reading both reports back to back, the honest assessment is this: the trajectory is intact, but the pace is not good enough.
Subscriber growth is real but incremental. The usage gap barely improved. Smartphone costs have not moved. 5G is coming, just slower than everywhere else. And the enormous economic upside the reports describe remains locked behind demand-side barriers that connectivity investment alone cannot break.
Sub-Saharan Africa will generate close to a quarter of all new mobile internet subscribers this decade. The world knows it. The investment is coming. But whether the continent captures the economic value that connectivity promises, or simply adds subscribers while the real productivity revolution happens elsewhere, will be decided by choices being made right now. On device pricing. On spectrum policy. On who gets left behind.
The GSMA reports measure what is happening. What happens next is up to the people building Africa’s digital future.
