By Nina Triantis, head of telecoms and media for Standard Bank Group
Covid-19 has impacted the globe in unimaginable ways. While all industries and sectors have been altered to varying degrees Africa’s technology, media , and telecom (TMT) sector has for the most part seen a boon because of the pandemic.
The acceleration of digital adoption, driven largely by professionals working from home and businesses digitising their offerings, has laid the foundation for growth in telecoms infrastructure and investment in Africa.
Covid-19 has led to a significant increase in web traffic driven by telecom meetings, and other activities. In fibre-to-the-home, demand for broadband surged in more established markets such as South Africa and Kenya . In South Africa, the government granted temporary emergency wireless spectrum to operators to allow them to add network capacity and implement upgrades to deal with the crisis and manage for the increased demand.
Corporates are also accelerating cloud adoption spurred on by investments in African data centres by big-time players such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.
Other tech players have also benefited with increased demand for laptops, mobile devices, teleconferencing software and security software.
Tech-enabled sectors – such as e-commerce – have seen strong growth while fintechs see significant increases in online, digital, and mobile transactions and the migration to cashless accelerates across the continent. Increased mobile and broadband penetration have been facilitators to African fintech whilst financial inclusion is also gathering pace.
As a result, interest from investors has been exceptional and points to an appreciation of Africa’s potential. Telecoms infrastructure across the board is in very high demand.
Private equity firms have been active participants. In September, African private equity firm Helios Investment Partners invested in Thunes, an emerging market fintech. Last year alone, venture capital firms invested $282,500,000 in African fintech startups.
Banks have also been incubating and investing in fintechs. Two such examples for Standard Bank include the platform OneFarm in Uganda as well as our investment in fintech Nomanini in South Africa in 2019.
Although over 400 million people across sub-Saharan Africa still don’t have access to mobile internet, mobile broadband networks cover more than 70% of the population, signalling huge opportunities for digital banking to succeed with the right offerings.Mobile has already played a key role in facilitating digital financial services with many mobile operators building their systems around being able to transact on a mobile phone. In Kenya, M-Pesa’s mobile offering has […]