This blog was co-authored by Areef Kassam and Helene Smertnik.

The West African market presents a significant untapped opportunity for our Mobile for Development Utilities programme – we could not miss the very first GSMA Mobile 360 West Africa event taking place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

Looking at the energy addressable market figures across countries of the region, Nigeria has over 70 million people (or 36 per cent of the population) who have access to mobile coverage before they have access to the electricity grid, while the Democratic Republic of Congo has over 20 million people (25 per cent of the population) and Mali over 10 million people (55 per cent of the population) in this same scenario.

To date, through the programme’s Innovation Fund and Advisory Services, we’ve been able to support several start-ups and mobile operators to trial and launch utility services. For example in Nigeria and Ghana, we’ve supporting projects with Lumos and PEG respectively. We also completed market assessments for Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. But we need to do much more. Our limitation in finding the opportunities has been our network in West Africa as our programme has had less exposure in West Africa than East Africa.

The Mobile 360 West Africa event gave us a great opportunity to balance that focus. With over 200 people from mobile operators and tech companies all in one place, we were able to network and start to build the relationships we need to grow our programme’s efforts in West Africa. Some of the highlights included meeting with several people from Orange, MTN and hearing the ICT Minister, Honorable Bruno Nabagne Kone speak on his vision for Cote d’Ivoire. It was a valuable event in building our understanding of the market context in West Africa and to build our network in the region which will grow our future activities.

Missed us at Mobile 360 West Africa?

Our next event is coming up soon! The Mobile for Development Utilities Africa Regional Working Group will bring together members of the energy, water and sanitation ecosystems with the African mobile industry. The event will be co-located with the next GSMA Africa series, taking place in Dar es Salaam. For the first time, we are offering exhibition space to all attendees to highlight their work in the mobile-enabled utility space, so participants will be able to get hands-on experience with a variety of mobile-enabled utility products and services. The Working Group is free to attend.

Date: 9 – 10 July 2017
Venue: Ramada Encore, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
RSVP: Send us an email
For more information please contact Arianna Freschi [email protected]