The continued development of mobile connectivity will benefit all economic activities on the continent, depending on their ability to integrate digital technology use cases. The services, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors are expected to capture the bulk of the expected benefits.
Fourth and fifth generation mobile technologies (4G and 5G) are expected to account for 75% of total connections in Africa in 2030, compared to 47% in 2024, according to a report published on Tuesday, October 14, 2025, by the Global Mobile Operators Association (GSMA).
Entitled The Mobile Economy Africa 2025, the report states that the percentage of 4G connections on the continent would increase from 45% of total mobile connections in 2024 to 54% in 2030. 5G is expected to grow even faster, rising from 2% of total connections last year to 21% by the end of the current decade.
2G, whose adoption was 15% last year, is expected to virtually disappear by 2030 (4% of total connections), while the adoption rate of 3G will fall from 37% to 21% over the same period.
The rapid migration to 4G and 5G will be driven primarily by the acceleration of network expansion. The GSMA expects telecom operators to spend approximately $77 billion deploying and upgrading next-generation networks between 2024 and 2030. As a result, mobile internet penetration is expected to reach 33% by the end of the decade (576 million users), up from 28% in 2014 (416 million users). The number of unique subscribers to various mobile networks will reach 915 million (53% of the population) in 2030, up from 710 million in 2024 (47%).
Nearly half of Africans will not use mobile phone services and 77% will not be connected to the mobile internet by the end of the current decade, despite network coverage reaching well over 90%. To close this usage gap, the mobile phone industry, donors, international organizations, and governments should work more closely together to address key barriers to mobile technology adoption, such as high device costs and low digital skills.
A contribution of 7.7% of the continent’s GDP in 2024
The report further highlights that the contribution of mobile telephony, all generations combined, to economic value added in Africa reached $220 billion, or 7.7% of the continent’s GDP. In this chapter, the main benefits come from the positive effects of mobile technologies on productivity, which reached $120 billion, and the direct contribution of the sector, estimated at $60 billion.
By 2030, mobile telephony’s contribution to economic value added on the continent is expected to reach $270 billion, or 7.4% of GDP, driven in particular by productivity and efficiency gains resulting from wider adoption of the latest generation of high-impact digital technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Mobile telephony is expected to benefit most sectors of the economy in sub-Saharan Africa, although some activities will benefit more than others due to their ability to integrate the use cases of the latest wave of cutting-edge digital technologies.
By 2030, 24% of the economic benefits are expected to come from the services sector (e-commerce, online medical consultations, e-learning, etc.) compared to 21% for the industry sector (smart factories, automation, robots, augmented reality, etc.) and 20% for agriculture (online weather forecasts, precision irrigation, market information, crop monitoring, etc.). This is followed by public administration (13%), construction and real estate (9%), finance (6%), and the information and communication sector (5%).
The GSMA also reports that mobile telephony makes a substantial contribution to African government budgets, with more than $30 billion collected through various types of taxes last year. A large portion of this contribution came from VAT on mobile phones, sales taxes, excise duties, and customs duties ($12 billion).
In 2024, the tax contribution of the entire mobile telephony ecosystem, which includes three categories of players (mobile operators, companies specializing in infrastructure and equipment and companies operating in the content and services segment) thus represented 9.8% of the total tax revenue collected on the continent.
