INTERNET OF THINGS: ENABLING THE FULL VALUE OF CONNECTIVITY

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Technology has the potential to fundamentally transform societies. It enables rapid improvements to industrial production and societal services, positively influencing the way we live and interact with our environment.

Africa is home to over a billion people and the population is expected to grow in the coming years. It is also a continent with the most growing economies and many from a low base. To accelerate its journey towards economic prosperity, the continent will have to take advantage of the new technologies to improve the government, business environment and society.

ICT and broadband are becoming central to the societal developments around the world. ICT allows people, knowledge and devices to be connected in new ways, and countries that embrace its potential can create new value, operate efficiently and benefit from significant return on investment. Broadband is further enabling new technologies environment like cloud, big data, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT).

Modernizing technological innovation towards the challenges countries are experiencing, will help Africa emerge from the economic challenges in a more sustainable manner. If the IoT period we are now entering is to be more inclusive and empowering, we need to start by examining the fundamental nature of the physical world fueled by digital connectivity.

The Great African Mobile 
Market Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the highest growth rate in mobile subscriptions globally. Looking forward to 2023, we foresee mobile subscriptions to exceed 900 million, total mobile data traffic growing 11x, and 75 million cellular IoT devices being connected. Growth is expected to improve due to an improvement in macro-economic conditions. The region’s middle class will continue to rise, leading to an increase in purchasing power, and stimulating demand for a wide range of products and services in the market. Projected population growth will put a strain on the existing general infrastructure, and the growing urbanization trend will drive service provider investment in key areas.

Moreover, rising youth population will drive the uptake of mobile broadband services and affordability is also driving the increase in mobile broadband uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa. Declining data prices, and an increase in the accessibility of smartphones due to lower prices is also driving growth.

IoT will provide the means for delivering innovative solutions to meet the socio-economic challenges and will transform businesses to enable more growth in Africa. Whilst Nigeria and South Africa will continue to increase the number of connected devices, IoT initiatives are seeing to advance in the rest of the region, especially East Africa.

An extract from the INTO AFRICA April 2019 Edition: Envision Africa’s Digital Revolution. The article is written by Nora Wahby (Head of Ericsson West Africa) and to read the full article, please download by clicking: INTO AFRICA PUBLICATION: APRIL 2019 EDITION.