Christoph Stork

Mobile telephony access and usage in Africa

This paper uses data from nationally representative household surveys conducted in 17 African countries to analyse mobile adoption and usage. The paper shows that countries differ in their levels of ICT adoption and usage and also in factors that influence adoption and usage. Income and education vastly enhance mobile adoption but gender, age and membership of social networks have little impact. Income is the main explanatory variable for usage. In terms of mobile expenditure the study also finds linkages to fixed-line, work and public phone usages. These linkages need, however, to be explored in more detail in future. Mobile expenditure is inelastic with respect to income, ie the proportion of mobile expenditure to individual income increases less than 1% for each 1% increase in income. This indicates that people with higher income spend a smaller proportion of their income on mobile expenditure compared to those with less income. The study provides tools to identify policy intervention to improve ICT take-up and usage and defines universal service obligations based on income and monthly usage costs. It helps to put a number to what can be expected from lower access and usage costs in terms of market volume and number of new subscribers. Linking this to other economic data such as national household income and expenditure surveys and GDP calculation would allow forecast of the economic and social impact of policy interventions. Key policy interventions would be regulatory measures to decrease access and usage costs, rural electrification and policies to increase ICT skills of pupils and teachers.

Mobile cellular telephone: Fixed-line substitution in Sub-Saharan Africa

Mobile cellular telephones have been the success story of communications globally. In the developed world, mobile telephony is traditionally seen as being complementary to fixed-line telephony, primarily because of its pervasiveness but also because the fixed-line network provides access to other technologies such as broadband. This article finds that, in nine African countries, in contrast to the developed world, mobile telephony is a substitute for fixed-line telephony - across all income groups and not just low income households as previously thought. The article argues in addition that pre-paid payment options (not just for mobile phones) are key to increasing use by low income households because irregular incomes do not support regular financial commitments in terms of contracts.

Analysis Instead of Summation: Why Indices Are Not Enough for ICT Policy and Regulation

This paper demonstrates that analysing ICT indicators, based on benchmarking through the application of a dynamic diagnostic approach with context relevant indicators, provides a far more valid evidence-base for ICT policy and regulation than using the ranking of a country on one of the global ICT indices. Both approaches - composite indices and benchmarking - use the same data but differ in how the data is analysed. Both approaches have shortcomings. However, the benchmarking approach used in this paper is seen as the starting point for further analysis, showing clearly the linkages between individual indicators. Global ICT indices, as they are currently formulated, disguise these linkages by providing a composite measure, encouraging the perception that the index is the end result of the analysis, rather than the beginning. Ranking all countries, from poorest to the richest, leads to an automatically high correlation of an index to GDP per capita, making the latter the best predictor for the index score.

Let Them Eat Movies: (How) Will Next-Generation Broadband Diffuse Through Africa?

“Wireless mobile services for the delivery of broadband provides false hope for the future and promotes inefficient use of resources in the present”, Eli Noam argued in Lusaka, one of the least connected capitals in the world. Applying his 2011 paper, Let Them Eat Cellphones: why mobile wireless is no solution for broadband, in which he rejects proposals in the United States for the deployment of mobile wireless services to meet rural broadband needs to Africa, he argued that the cost of mobile wireless deployment was only cheaper in the short term. The high costs associated with matching constantly growing demand with limited supply of spectrum, he argued, meant that mobile did not enjoy the longer term economies of scale that fixed-line investments did. Noam also cautioned against underestimating the power of video, to which he attributed broadband take up in the United States. He challenged the notion that communities forced to access video on mobile wireless networks would simply accept poorer quality services than their urban or wealthier counterparts, who were able to receive the array of high-quality digital services on offer.