While
the mobile companies have realized the importance of the mobile
audience and use it for generating income through advertising and
product auctioning most of the African governments are still sleeping to
utilize the opportunity. The individual companies have
been advertising through cheap mobile ads and have been able to reach
millions of users through mobile phone.
While
the total global ads spending is US$ 5,333 Million only US$ 172 Million
is coming from Africa this means that only 3% of the total ads spending
to mobile ads and services globally comes from Africa.
This is so disappointing putting in mind the number of mobile users in
Africa. “Out of every 100 people, 65 have some form of mobile
connectivity” according to Peter Lyons, GSMA's director of spectrum
policy for Africa and Middle East when he was explaining the status of
mobile penetration on BBC’s focus on Africa Programme.
The
Revenues that is generated by the Mobile advertising industry globally
between (2010-2012) is US$ 20,610.0 Million while Africa has been
grouped in the group of the rest of the world sharing US$ 2,761.7
Million revenue the actual figure for Africa is not known but logically
is still too small comparing to the opportunity that African mobile
users possess to their governments and stakeholders.
Kenya
is among the leading countries in Africa who at least utilizes the
opportunity that comes with the mobile technologies. Kenya is at the
forefront of mobile money transfers, with 8.5 million users and several
projects to utilize the opportunities that come with mobile technologies
things like M-Farm, M-Health and others.
The
mobile industry in Africa is booming and a catalyst for immense growth,
but there is scope for far greater development. If our governments
decides themselves to commit in mobile technologies it will help to
promote so many other sectors in our community and reduce spending in
funding some other projects which collects money unnecessarily from our
governments.
The
governments could have used mobile phones to create social awareness in
our communities. Instead of spending millions putting road side ads to
create awareness on the effect of (HIV) AIDS they could have a
centralized database which send SMS to mobile phones telling people
about HIV (AIDS) because SMS is among the most basic features which
available in mobile phones. This is just an example on how the mobile
phone could be used to impact the community and cut down cost in some of
the government’s projects.
Government
spends a lot of money gathering data and information manually from
people billions of Shillings have to be injected into projects so that
they can reach even remote areas and villages but believe me the mobile
phone can just do that for them.
The
Kenyan government's abolition of the 16% general sales tax on mobile
handsets in 2009 has resulted in handset purchases increasing by more
than 200%. What
does this mean when you gave the chance for people to have mobile
phones on their hands means that you will have a chance to not only get
the revenue from the business but the opportunity to reach more people
when you want to provide services to them.
There
have been so many projects going on some of them are effective while
others remains on papers on the use of mobile technologies to impact
community. The most recent one is the Tigo Kilimo in
Tanzania while almost 75 percent of Tanzanian’s are farmers we expect
them to have the opportunity to cultivate the products and practice
agriculture in the most efficiency way that was the aim of Tigo Kilimobut can it be successful without a complete government support and public awareness programmes? People
needs to hear it from the government themselves that why most of the
mobile initiative to impact the communities fail because the government
are either not taking them seriously or they don’t believe in mobile
technologies to impact the communities.
Now,
if the problem seems to be solved meaning that by 2015 we expect to
have 36 million mobile subscribers in Tanzania comparing to the total
population of about 45 million it means the government can reach almost
72 percent of Tanzanian. The questions that emerge how the government is
prepared to use this opportunity? It
expected there will be more than 735 million subscribers by the end of
2012 in Africa. Is the continent prepared to use the opportunity?
Sources: BBC News Africa, Mobithinking.com
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