Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Telecoms: Nigeria still lags behind many African countries - Report


Despite the much proclaimed successes of the Nigeria’s telecommunications sector, the nation still lags behind many other African countries with respect to a number of market indicators, DigitalSENSE Business News can authoritatively reports.

A study entitled “Understanding what is happening in ICT in Nigeria” authored by Fola Odufuwa in an evidence for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Policy Action, Paper 6, made available to DigitalSENSE Business News.

According to Odufuwa in the Executive Summary of the report, noted that the Nigerian telecommunications market has been fully liberalised, highly competitive, and evolving with time.

This, the report traced to 1992, a wide range of regulatory initiatives which has been undertaken to open up the market to private operators to provide products and services across the entire spectrum of ICT market segments.

DigitalSENSE Business News gathered that these initiatives, particularly in relation to market entry, have resulted in an impressive 53 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in overall fixed and mobile subscriptions since 2001.

Quarterly telecommunications sectoral growth, the report says is up to 35 per cent, and the sector’s annual contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was estimated at 6.73 per cent in 2012.

However, in spite of the widely publicised successes, DigitalSENSE Business News was told that Nigeria, as highlighted in this recent RIA Sector Performance Review (SPR), lags behind many other African countries with respect to a number of market indicators.

Using nationally representative household survey samples, the report by Odufuwa quoted RIA’s 2012 ICT Access and Usage Surveys in 12 African countries focused on household, individual and informal business ICT access and usage.

Among RIA ICT Survey countries, Nigeria ranked 5th with respect to mobile penetration and 5th in terms of industry perception of the effectiveness of domestic telecommunications regulation.

Equally in terms of RIA’s broader Pricing Transparency Index: Prepaid Mobile for 2012, he said, Nigeria was ranked 17th out of 46 countries in terms of the affordability of the cheapest prepaid mobile product from a dominant operator, and 13th out of 46 for affordability of the cheapest mobile prepaid product from any operator.

The report further quoted the 2012 RIA Nigeria ICT Access and Usage Survey as founding out that there is a general paradox in Nigeria’s telecommunications market; of performance on the one hand and deficiency on the other and that this paradox exists across all the subsectors of the market.


“For example, mobile telephony is experiencing huge growth simultaneous with a fixed sector in a downward spiral. The penetration of fixed telephony is a meagre 65,914 households, or 0.3 per cent of total households in the country, in spite of the fact that the RIA ICT Survey found ample demand for both fixed and mobile telephony products,” the report submits.

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Pix: cover of the report - Understanding what is happening in ICT in Nigeria

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