ITU TELECOM AFRICA 2001 will be staged in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 12 to 16 November 2001. It will be the ITU's fifth regional event for Africa since the first one was held in 1986, and is the only telecoms event being hosted by the Government of the Republic of South Africa in the year 2001. Taking place as it does in – and for – the region of the world that most needs increased telecoms development, AFRICA 2001 promises to be a crucial event in Bridging the Digital Divide.

---

MARKET OVERVIEW

In terms of telecommunications development, Africa is one of the most diverse regions in the world. Six of the wealthier countries in Africa have more than ten lines per hundred people, but in 28 of Africa’s 56 nations there are still more than one hundred people for every main telephone line.

The region therefore offers a huge range of business opportunities and tremendous scope for expanding both basic and advanced telecommunications services. And even though growth was strong throughout the past decade, with the number of main telephone lines in the region more than doubling to reach nearly 20 million by the beginning of 2001, there is still enormous opportunity – the region as a whole had a teledensity of just 2.5 per cent by the beginning of the year 2001, still less than a sixth of the world average.

Advanced telecommunications services – and notably mobile cellular and the Internet – will bring enormous changes to Africa in the first decade of the new millennium, and there are clear signs that with increasing competition telecommunications development will now accelerate even faster.

Today, however, there is still an enormous amount of work that must be done to bring Africa up to the levels of the industrialized world. By the beginning of the year 2001, Africa – which is home to around one in eight of the world’s people – had just under one in 50 of the world's fixed line subscribers, one in 60 of the world's mobile cellular subscribers, one on 70 of the world’s personal computers and only one in 80 of the world’s Internet users.

There are nevertheless strong grounds for optimism. Many countries in the region are on the road to sectoral reform and foreign investment is now being actively encouraged across the continent as privatization and liberalization are progressively introduced across the continent. Also encouraging is that mobile cellular subscribers already outnumber fixed-line subscribers in ten African countries – and by the time AFRICA 2001 takes place the trend will be even more widespread. Internet uptake in many countries in Africa is on the rise too, and there is great potential in Africa for technology leapfrogging.

---

SUBSCRIBER GROWTH – FIXED, MOBILE AND THE INTERNET

At the beginning of 1991 there were just 9.2 million main telephone lines in Africa, giving a regional teledensity of just 1.45 per cent – or only just over 14 lines for every thousand people. By the beginning of the year 2001, however, the region was served by nearly 20 million lines, and the teledensity had nearly doubled over the period to 2.5 lines per hundred people, even allowing for an increase in population of 25 per cent.

The growth has been uneven, however. In countries afflicted by war or civil strife development has been halted, or even pushed back. And in 28 of the region’s economies teledensity is still below one, meaning that fewer than one in a hundred people has a telephone line.

---

 

MOBILE CELLULAR EXPLOSION

While fixed-line subscriber growth in Africa as a whole has been encouraging through the 1990s, the strongest trend here, as in the rest of the world, has been in the explosion in mobile cellular subscribers.

At the beginning of 1991 there were fewer than 22,000 mobile cellular subscribers in the whole of Africa, but by the beginning of 2001 there were more than 11 million. In a number of economies – including Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, the Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda – cellular subscribers now outnumber their fixed line counterparts.

At the same time, the successful introduction of prepaid services in Senegal in 1998 has prompted other countries to follow suit, increasing accessibility to a point where prepaid users now account for around 50 per cent of all subscribers in fast-growing markets such as South Africa and Egypt.

Pre-paid subscriptions are particularly relevant to Africa, since they allow consumers to manage their consumption in a controlled way while giving operators a simple means of providing services to lower income users without the need for expensive and time-consuming credit checks. Pre-paid subscriptions also secure payments from customers in advance of the service being provided which greatly facilitates the collection of charges. As a result they make cellular telephony accessible to a much wider audience, and are potentially one of the best opportunities in the world today for achieving universal access.

The relatively late adoption of pre-paid subscriptions in the region and the continuing opening up of markets to competition mean that the explosive growth seen so far is likely to be just a taste of the growth to come. 

Even more importantly, foreign operators’ drive to tap into new cellular markets and opportunities is finally helping overturn Africa’s chronic lack of investment funds for telecoms development. By the beginning of the year 2001, 18 of the 33 UN-designated Least Developed Countries in Africa had already awarded licences to cellular operators with one or more foreign investors.

In addition, widespread liberalization of mobile markets across the continent is opening up investment opportunities for fast-moving local operators, who can trade on their experience in local markets to expand operations into other countries within the region.

Government’s ability to raise much-needed capital through mobile licence fees is also providing a substantial boost to many countries’ telecoms expenditure funds, creating a healthy demand for new equipment to upgrade ageing infrastructure and extend services to under-served areas.

 

---

 

THE INTERNET

Meanwhile, Africa continues to make good progress in Internet development, with only one of the continent’s 56 nations – Eritrea – now lacking direct connection to the international Internet backbone.

Penetration figures for the continent are, however, skewed strongly in favour of wealthier nations like the Seychelles (7.4%), Mauritius (7.3%), South Africa (5.5%) and Cape Verde (1.8%), with penetration in lower income countries like Burundi, Chad, Niger or Sudan still hovering at around two or three users per 10,000 inhabitants.

For the moment, the biggest stumbling blocks to faster uptake remain the lack of infrastructure and the prohibitive price of service, which, at around US$50 per month, represents more than an average month’s salary in many African countries.

A number of initiatives, such as the ITU’s Electronic Commerce for Developing Countries 1 and USAID’s Leland Initiative Africa Global Information Infrastructure Project are working to help alleviate these and other problems through resource-pooling, network capacity-sharing and the fostering of a competitive environment for Internet service provision.

Even though there is the potential for the number of Internet users in the region to keep doubling year on year there is also a very real danger that infrastructure rollout will not be able to keep up with user demand. Continuous investment will therefore be needed to ensure that the region’s peoples have access to the wealth of information and potential the Internet can bring.

---

 

A CHANGING REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT

In the area of regulation and sector restructuring, the initiatives towards privatization of the region’s national operators and the establishment of national regulators which began in the early 1990s continue to gain momentum. In fact by the beginning of the year 2001, 18 of Africa’s 56 countries had privatized or partly privatized their national operators, and a further 22 were planning to do so in the near future.

Even more encouraging is the recent trend to increase the powers and independence of regulatory agencies by separating them clearly from government and endowing them with their own operating charter.

By the beginning of 2001 some 33 African nations had an independent regulator, including South Africa, which merged its telecoms and broadcasting regulators in the year 2000 to create the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA). Another nine African countries are expected to create regulators soon.

---

 

A BRIGHT FUTURE

Concerted efforts to create a welcoming environment for investment, combined with deployment of new and low-cost technologies that can help nations ‘leapfrog’ older and less efficient systems, will help Africa advance rapidly over the coming years. With a firm commitment to training and technology transfer and a focus on creating smart partnerships that bring tangible benefits to all parties, Africa now has perhaps its best chance ever to transform its telecoms environment and join the Information Age. 

ITU TELECOM AFRICA 2001 will play a key part in that transformation, bringing together the most influential vendors and decision-makers from throughout the region and around the world to help bridge the Digital Divide and nurture the flowering of a new, communications-led economy.