Following a interesting meeting with the PS of Kenya Ministry of Information and Communication Bitange Ndemo, am here in Niarobi to move ubuni.org forward.
Anything over mobiles is grabbing attention here, it's one of the hotspots in Africa for mobile. The telco's are pushing forward with 3G and 4G services and looking for ways to drive usuage. Mobile money has been a success story and i guess is taking a similar place to online payments in Europe, but it's much more because mobile money (e.g. M-Pesa) makes person to person cash transfer as easy as an SMS.
Google.KE have also dipped their toes in the mobile market here, adding free sms to their google chat offering.
With little infrastructure for landline-based broadband, there have been huge investments in alternatives eg Safaricoms, Wimax (a fixed wireless broadband service). CCK (kenya's communications regulatory body) report a continuing decline in traffic over fixed networks (landlines) and mobile traffic rising. There's been a 38% increase in internet subscriptions in the last year 98% of which has been mobile subscriptions, giving over 30% of the population access to the internet. Mobile penetration is over 60%.
| Table 15: Revenue and Investment in the Data/Internet Market* | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | % Change over 2009 | % Change over 2008 | % Change over 2007 | |
| Mobile Revenue(KES Millions) | 148,033 | 145,800 | 7,595 | 7,370 | 1.5 | 1849.1 | 1908.6 | |
| Mobile Investments (KES Millions) | 29,361 | 53,870 | 1,171 | 833 | -45.5 | 2407.3 | 3424.7 | |
| * Note that revenue in the data market are not inclusive of the data revenues from the mobile sector. | ||||||||
"The Internet market is expected to remain on a growth trajectory as mobile operators continue concentrating on this service in a bid to sustain and/or increase revenues as well as service innovation to meet consumer demands.
The growth in Internet usage has continued to rise with the mobile handset being the most popular medium of access. This could be attributed to intense promotions especially the use of social sites such as face book and twitter and consequently their popularity among the youth. In the last five years the number of new Internet users was recorded as more than 10 million. The proportion of the population with internet access accounted for 31.8 per cent, which is still below other services such as the mobile telecommunications. New service innovations, product differentiation as well as competitive pricing may be required to stimulate this sub-sector further.
CCK 2011
| Percentage of mobile Web users who never or infrequently use the desktop Web | |||
| Country | Percentage mobile-only | Country | Percentage mobile-only |
| Egypt | 70% | Indonesia | 44% |
| India | 59% | Thailand | 32% |
| South Africa | 57% | China | 30% |
| Ghana | 55% | US | 25% |
| Kenya | 54% | UK | 22% |
| Nigeria | 50% | Russia | 19% |
| Source: On Device Research (December 2010) | Survey group: 15,204 | via: mobiThinking | |
Gartner (March 2010) predicts that in 2011, over 85 percent of handsets shipped globally will include some form of browser." All this makes Kenya a very interesting starting point for any project which is going mobile over Africa.
A recent paper by Vodafone Making Broadband Accessible For All
described one of its key findings as... The ubiquity of mobile and the growing number of low cost smart devices means that data services will be primarily accessed via mobile, particularly in emerging markets.
Right place, right time to be thinking of enabling learning for social change via mobiles in africa - no?
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