Mobile Comms Africa

Article

A Stanford Journal of African Studies (SAUTI) academic article by Eugene Carl Adogla tracing the rapid spread of mobile telephony across Africa, noting that active mobile handsets reached 76.8 million by August 2005, just 18 years after the first phones arrived on the continent, with a 58% annualised growth rate and roughly 5,000% cumulative growth between 1998 and 2005 — outperforming every other world region. The article argues that raw subscriber numbers only partly capture mobile telephony’s impact, which had by then reshaped social, cultural and economic life from the Kalahari Desert to the crowded cities of Cairo and Lagos.