Indigo Stats

On this page you’ll find some key facts about internet and mobile phone coverage and access across the globe. We hope that this will help explain why Indigo believes in the transformative potential of ICT and why we are working in this area. As this is fast-moving ground, we will try to update these statistics as frequently as possible. If you have any interesting stats you think we should include, please leave a comment at the bottom of the page and we will check them out.

Internet Access

• The number of internet users in Africa increased from 4.5 million in 2000 (0.6%) to 110 million (10.9%) by 2010.[1]
• With 43m users, Nigeria has more than twice the number of internet users than its next African rival Egypt.[2]
• A person living in a developed country is, on average, 600 times more likely to have access to fixed broadband than one living in an LDC.[3]
• In Kenya, 99% of all internet subscribers accessed the internet from a mobile in 2009.[4]
• Globally, one billion Tweets are sent per week; the UK alone sends almost 2bn SMS per week.[5]
• In 2011, 35% of the world’s population were internet users. Of those almost 2.5bn people, 62% lived in developing countries.[6]
• In 2010, there were 251m fixed broadband subscribers in the developing world vs. 304m in the developed world.[7]
• 3.09% of Africans (23.7m) are on Facebook; 39.37% of Americans are.[9]
• March 2000 – the UK’s first broadband connection; September 2009 – East Africa goes broadband; July 2010 – West Africa goes broadband.[10]
• India is second only to the US in terms of Twitter traffic.[11]

Mobile Access

• In Chad, there are 24,000% more mobile subscriptions than fixed landline subscriptions.[12]
• Developing nations account for 80% of all new mobile subscriptions worldwide.[13]
• Sales of smartphones globally increased 150% between 2008 and 2010.[14]
• In the world’s 49 LDCs, mobile subscriptions rose from 2 per 100 in 2005 to 25 per 100 in 2009.[15]
• In Rwanda, almost half of all urban households have a mobile; in rural households that figure drops to less than one in ten.[16]
• In India, there are just 5 internet connections per 100 people, but there are 44 mobile subscriptions per 100 people.[17]
• A study of five Asian countries found that 30% of low-income subscribers were using second-hand mobiles.[18]
• In India approximately 20 million new mobile phone subscribers sign up every month, nearly one-third of them in rural areas.[19]
• In 2010 there were an estimated 5.28bn mobile handsets in the world; 3.84bn of them in the developing world (67.6 per 100 population) vs. 1.43bn in the developed world (116.1 per 100 population). Africa had 333m handsets.[20]
• Of the 5.28bn mobile subscribers, 2.64bn were to be found in Asia and the Pacific.[21]
• 90% of the world’s population are now covered by mobile networks, including 80% in rural areas.[22]
• Globally, the total number of SMS sent tripled between 2007 and 2010, from an estimated 1.8 trillion to a staggering 6.1 trillion. That’s almost 200,000 text messages every second, a figure which puts Twitter’s 600 tweets per second to shame.[23]
• Globally, mobile subscriptions have increased from 12 per 100 population in 2000 to 76.2 per 100 in 2010.[24]
• In Africa, there are 1.6 landline phones per 100 people and 41.4 mobile subscriptions per 100 people; in Europe the figures are 40.3 and 120 respectively.[25]
• In Africa, as many people have access to a mobile phone as they do to electricity or improved sanitation (41.4 per 100 vs. 41.9 per 100 vs. 41.7 per 100 respectively).[26]
• Pakistan, Kenya and Indonesia have surpassed or are expected to surpass 100% mobile penetration within the 20-29 year old demographic this year.[27]
• Women currently constitute 18% of mobile subscribers in Afghanistan.[28]

Finance and Rural Development

• A 10% increase in mobile penetration rates is associated with a 1% increase in GDP.[29]
• Approx. 1.7bn people previously without a bank account had a mobile by the end of 2010.[30]
• In 2010 there were 61 known mobile money services in 35 countries, 13 of them in LDCs.[31]
• Mobile money services are on average 19% cheaper than formal banks.[32]
• M-Pesa gained its millionth customer in November 2007, just seven months after its creation. Today it has 14m users in Kenya out of a total population of 41m.[33]
• By 2009, the UK had just 3m mobile banking customers.[34]
• By 2014 there will be an estimated 913m mobile banking users. Of those, only 190m will live in Europe or North America.[35]
• A 10 per cent increase in the number of a country’s web hosts is associated with an export gain of around 0.2 per cent.[36]

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1. AfDB, ‘The Middle of the Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa’, Market Brief (April 2011) and http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (accessed 10.5.2011)

2. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (accessed 10.05.2011)

3. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.69.

4. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.71.

5. http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/numbers.html and http://tinyurl.com/5r83fjk (accessed 09.05.2011)

6. ITU, The World in 2011 (2011)

7. http://tinyurl.com/698c7sr (accessed 09.05.2011)

8. ITU, The World in 2010 (2010)

9. http://www.socialbakers.com/countries/continents (accessed 09.05.2011)

10. http://tinyurl.com/y8puhaw and http://tinyurl.com/69a2e5j (accessed 26.06.2011)

11. http://tinyurl.com/5txelsx (accessed 09.05.2011)

12. World Economic Forum, The Africa Competitiveness Report 2011 (2011), p.141.

13. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.xiv.

14. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.57.

15. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.69.

16. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.69.

17. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.73.

18. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.75.

19. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.80.

20. http://tinyurl.com/698c7sr (accessed 11.05.2011)

21. http://tinyurl.com/698c7sr (accessed 11.05.2011)

22. ITU, The World in 2010 (2010)

23. ITU, The World in 2010 (2010) and http://tinyurl.com/6kbrmdu (accessed 10.5.2011)

24. ITU, Global ICT Dev via http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ (accessed 23.06.2011)

25. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/index.html (accessed 09.05.2011)

26. http://tinyurl.com/25h36k3 and http://tinyurl.com/6de36e9 (accessed 09.05.2011) and WHO/Unicef, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water (2010)

27. http://tinyurl.com/624tz6w (accessed 10.5.2011)

28. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.71.

29. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.3.

30. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.71.

31. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.71.

32. World Economic Forum, The Global Information Technology Report 2010-2011 (2011), p.71.

33. http://www.safaricom.co.ke/index.php?id=1073 (accessed 09.05.2011)

34. Monitise, ‘Mobile Banking Use Accelerates in Personal Finance Revolution’

35. http://www.cellular-news.com/story/36502.php (accessed 09.05.2011)

36. UNECA, Assessing Regional Integration in Africa (ARIA IV) (2010), p.224.