Phone Costs & Power Cuts Keep 906 Million Africans Offline Despite Coverage Gains
Africa has spent a decade and billions of dollars building mobile networks. The result is a continent where 92% of the population lives within reach of a mobile broadband signal. Yet only 36% of Africans use the internet at all, leaving roughly 906 million people in a strange limbo. They are covered, but they are not connected.
The GSMA and the Partnership for Digital Access in Africa call this the usage gap, and a new roadmap released this week argues it is now the central challenge for the continent’s digital future.
The coverage gap, the 122 million people beyond any network, is shrinking, but the usage gap is not. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between coverage and actual use is more than double the global average, according to the GSMA’s State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2026 report.
The roadmap, developed by GSMA Intelligence and launched at the United Nations General Assembly, focuses on three priorities. The most immediate is migrating the more than 600 million mobile connections still running on 2G and 3G networks onto 4G and 5G smartphones.
But the cost barrier is significant. An entry-level internet-enabled smartphone now costs the equivalent of 76% of average monthly income in Sub-Saharan Africa, up from 44% for the poorest 20% of people in low and middle-income countries globally. Rising memory and chipset prices have pushed smartphone shipments across Africa down seven 7% year on year, with the crucial sub-USD 100.00 segment collapsing by 34%.
“Africa has already built much of the network foundation for its digital future,” said John Giusti, GSMA Chief Regulatory Officer. “The urgent task now is to close the usage gap by making smartphones and services affordable, equipping people with practical skills, building trust, and ensuring connectivity delivers visible value in people’s daily lives.”
The second priority is energy. Nearly 600 million Africans lack reliable electricity. A network tower without power is useless, and a smartphone without a charge is a brick. The roadmap calls for treating electrification and connectivity as a single investment agenda, using telecom towers as anchor customers for renewable mini-grids that can also power schools, clinics, and community hubs.
Meanwhile, extending networks to sparsely populated areas is commercially difficult, so the roadmap pushes for shared infrastructure, outcome-based universal service funds, and using public institutions like schools and health facilities as anchor demand to make rural buildouts viable.
Halving the usage gap across the 11 countries studied would bring 245 million people online. Closing it entirely by 2030 could add USD 700 B to Africa’s GDP. But the roadmap is clear that no single intervention will get there, as it recommends that governments must cut taxes on entry-level devices, operators must expand device financing and infrastructure sharing, and development partners must fund the adoption side of the equation, not just the build.
“The goal is ambitious, but it is achievable,” said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former President of Liberia and PDAA Co-Chair. “If we bring together connectivity, electrification, affordable devices and digital skills, we can ensure that the continent’s digital transformation leaves no community behind.”
