Branding Africa

Dramatic rise of African consumer power - 20 Nov 2017

By Louise Marsland

While Zimbabwe teeters on a knife edge with the refusal by President Robert Mugabe to resign by the 12 noon deadline today, Monday 20 November, after being recalled by his own party, ZaNU-PF, he may now face impeachment as President. Sunday night saw the speech in which he was expected to resign, beamed around the world via every major global television network. The tweets at #Mugabe were not pretty following on from that.
But as always, when reporting on business-to-business news in Africa, there is good news and Africa is expected to have 310 million LTE subscriptions in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2023. The report from Ericsson also announced that mobile subscriptions in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to grow by 6%, between 2017 and 2023, from 700 million mobile subscriptions in 2017 to 990 million subscriptions by 2023.
The dramatic rise of African consumer power is also credited with driving development across the African continent - for example, Lagos and Kinshasa each added more than 4 million to their 'consumer classes' in the last decade. Cairo added another 3.5 million. Fourteen other African cities added at least a million consumers each - including Abidjan, Nairobi, and Yaoundé. Meeting the demands of these consumers requires new infrastructure investments across the continent.
Of course it is not all good news and press freedom abuses were highlighted last week at the International Press Freedom Awards where Cameroon journalist Ahmed Abba, who is imprisoned, was honoured.

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Have a great week!
Louise Marsland
Africa Editor: Bizcommunity.com

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