Why is this? There seems to be somewhat of a vicious circle, starting, as often, at operator-level. For instance, out of the 26 operators in the 5 countries I worked on last year (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire) only 2 to my knowledge, Safaricom and Starcomms, publicly released their data ARPU. The most likely explanation for this is that the data figures are still so low on most networks that operators simply don’t want to release them at this stage. Even Safaricom, including M-Pesa, was only at $1 monthly, and Starcomms, including EV-DO dongles, was just under $2. But at least, we know where they stand, and we will be able to measure their progress when they next update those figures. The law of silence applied by other networks only has the counter-productive effect of making it harder for international content companies, who precisely could help operators boost their data traffic, penetrate their markets.
If not at the source, where else then can the information be found? Some suppliers to operators have access to it, but they understandably cannot reveal the information, even if they were to aggregate it. The same can be said of other players who have been given the information by operators on a confidential basis. As far as content providers and aggregators go, they can derive statistics from their sales, but such data can only be relative to their user base and market shares.
If we are to ignore first-hand market players altogether, independent market research could be a good option, especially that the resulting data would, in theory, be totally unbiased. But that comes at a cost, and to my knowledge, there has been no significant study in any SSA market that has effectively monitored the usage of an accurate and sizeable sample of users in order to determine mobile content market metrics. And when there will be, it will need to be commissioned by a public organization or an industry association in order for its content to be made public or semi-public.
As that last point indicates, it seems that the only solution can come from neutral organizations such as international bodies, regulators and industry associations. That is precisely their role. They have both the institutional power to request the information from operators, and the financial ability to run or commission their own independent studies. For instance, the ITU is able to provide extensive metrics in its annual Africa report for voice, fixed-line and broadband. If mobile content is really to become the next big thing in SSA, then it must be taken seriously. And that begins with putting numbers on it.
