Sadly it wasn’t news to me when Nielsen reported recently that more in Africa have access to a mobile device than clean drinking water.
We pray that technology advances will improve the water situation soon.
Other data points from Nielsen were new and fascinating:
South Africa ranks fifth in the world for mobile data usage, ahead of the United States, which ranks seventh.
Facebook is the most popular social media platform, used by 85 percent of mobile subscribers. Half of all users of Facebook in South Africa access the site via their mobiles.
Text messaging is used by almost 4.2 times more people than e-mail. More than two-thirds (69%) of consumers prefer sending texts to calling, in large part because it is less expensive, and 10 percent believe texting to be a faster way of communicating.
The majority (60%) of South African mobile users said they are aware of mobile banking services offered by banks, but only 21 percent say they use such services. A much larger number of those aware of the services said they would never use them, suggesting banks might need to invest in communicating the benefits and security of mobile banking.
Nielsen’s blog post on the study is here http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/mobile-phones-dominate-in-south-africa/.
