The era of Mobile phones has been duped the greatest technology Africa has ever had. Across Africa, mobile phones spur innovation and boost incomes to different businesses for example farmers use them to check market prices before selling to middlemen, and market traders can accept payments in mobile money.
The precise impact of phones on economic growth is notoriously difficult to measure (although that does not stop trade bodies and consultants from issuing gushing reports filled with unnervingly exact numbers). The GSMA, an international trade body, argues that for every 10% increase in phone penetration in poor countries, productivity improves by more than four percentage points, and that a doubling in mobile-data usage increases annual growth in GDP per person by half a percentage point. Yet more may be in store as Africa stands on the cusp of a second mobile-phone revolution.
A decade ago there were only 129m mobile-phone subscriptions in the whole of Africa, though even that was already ten times more than the number of fixed-line phones. But since then the number of active subscriptions has jumped to almost 1bn. At first blush that would suggest that just about every African (there are 1.2bn of them, with north Africa included) now has a phone. In fact, a large number of Africans have been consummate arbitrageurs of tariffs, switching SIM cards in and out of their phones depending on whom they are calling.
Mobile technology has had a profound impact on all segments of African society, but people living at the bottom of the pyramid have the most to gain from access to information. Research has shown that everyday people whose jobs are made possible by the mobile economy and small business owners whose livelihoods have been transformed through mobile connectivity. It includes perspectives from academics who place the society impact of mobile phones into context, and government regulators who discuss their plans for encouraging future innovations within their respective countries.
Mobile technology has also proved to be the source of Information and Entertainment to many end-users, as we are moving in the 4th industrial revolution mobile phones as turned to be smartphones on where anything you might think of can be achieved in slit seconds, the IoT (Internet of Things) has made everything to be possible, in Zimbabwe recently, a local Social Media Company, Hiclicker just launch a mobile TV on which you can watch any of favourite sports, movies, etc, from your mobile phone using less amount of data.
