Africa Mobile Market Fastest Growing in World

If you can remember 1970s and 1980s policy discussions in the global telecom community about how to provide basic telephone service to the billion or more people who had never made a phone call, you will be astonished at how powerful mobile services have been. A problem thought too expensive to solve now is well on the way to vanishing.

Africa, for example,  is the fastest-growing mobile market in the world and the largest after Asia, according to the GSM Association.

The number of subscribers on the continent has grown almost 20% each year for the past five years, according to the GSM Association GSMA report on the African mobile market. The GSMA expects there will be more than 735 million subscribers by the end of 2012.

Among the changes mobility is bringing is a new access to banking services. Africa already has 51 mobile money systems in place, serving more than 40 million African users.