Africa Broadband Adoption Low, but Poised for Big Change

While just 16 percent of the continent’s one billion people are online, that picture is changing rapidly.

While Internet penetration is just over 16 percent across the continent as a whole, it is much higher in urban areas, where more than 50 percent of residents use the Internet regularly.

A recent McKinsey report found that 25 percent of urban Africans go online daily, led by Kenyans at 47 percent and Senegalese at 34 percent, according to McKinsey.

Still, levels of broadband service remain relatively low. Overall broadband penetration, on a per-capita basis, is about 2.5 percent in Algeria, and 0.1 percent in Angola, for example. Per-capita measures understate fixed network broadband penetration, however, to the extent that a connection is to households with multiple residents.

If typical household membership is five, all the per-capita measures need to be multiplied by five, to derive penetration of households, which is the more meaningful metric, some would say.

Country	Per-Capita Broadband Penetration	Per-Capita Mobile Penetration
Algeria	2.5	103
Angola	0.1	49
Cameroon	0	64
Cote d’Ivoire	0	96
Egypt	1.8	115
Ethiopia	0.8	24
Ghana	0.2	100
Kenya	0	72
Morocco	1.6	120
Mozambique	0.1	33
Nigeria	0.1	68
Senegal	0.6	88
South Africa	1.5	135
Tanzania	0	57