The Global Digital Report 2019 Has Some Interesting Stats About Africa

Africa Mobile Connection
Africa Mobile Connection
The Global Digital Report 2019 Has Some Interesting Stats About Africa – Photo credit Ollyy

The Global Digital Report 2019 by Hootsuite and We Are Social is out. The report brings about an exciting revelation of how the world is growing fast in terms of digital resources and utilization. The number of new users taking up and consuming internet resources is increasing by the second in all parts of the world. Additionally, the number of individuals using mobile phones is also increasing by the day. This means that more people are using the internet and mobile telephony technologies today than ever before.

In a day, more than one million people start using the internet for the first time ever in their lives. This means that there are one million new users of the internet daily. This huge number of new users have been added daily for the last one year. For example, when the day ends today, the number of internet users in the world will be one million more than it was yesterday. In order to understand the report well, we have simplified and compiled the most salient talking points.

Summary of the Global Digital Report 2019

Before we go deeper into the report, you need to understand the following salient points for the global digital report;

  • In the world today, there are 5.11 billion unique users of mobile phones. This is 100 million more than it was in the last year. The increase translates to two percent.
  • Since January 2018, people using the internet have increased by 366 million (nine percent) to stand at 4.39 billion today.
  • The number of people using social media has grown by 288 million (nine percent) to reach 3.48 billion today.
  • The number of people going social on their mobiles has increased by 297 million (more than 10 percent) to stand at 3.26 billion today.
The Global Digital Report 2019
Photo credit Hootsuite

For comparison, the world has 7.676 billion human beings today. When you compare the numbers above, you will realize that global mobile penetration stands at 67 percent. Internet penetration is at 57 percent while social media penetration goes to 45 percent. Additionally, those people using their mobile phones to access the internet amount to 42 percent of the total population in the world.

It is therefore not surprising that the global digital growth surpasses the average global population growth in all parameters. For example, while the global population growth rate is only 1.1 percent, mobile social media users’ growth is 10 percent.

The Report Contributors

This report that comprises thousands of charts taken from more than 200 other local and global reports was made possible by contributions of other data partners. These data partners were App Annie, GlobalWebIndex, GSMA Intelligence, Locowise, SimilarWeb, and Statista.

Internet Users in 2019

The Global Digital Report 2019 shows that the rate at which people are taking up the internet is very promising. In fact more than 11 people are going online every second around the world for their very maiden instance. This means that as you finish reading this sentence; more than 11 people will have joined the internet users’ bandwagon for the first time in their lives. Additionally, mobile phone accounts for about half of the time used online.

But where are people visiting when they go online? The surge of internet use can somehow explain the cause of increased social media use. However, the most visited website in the world still remains Google. Youtube comes second and as expected, Facebook. Social media, e-commerce and adult sites feature strongly in the list of popular sites. Here is a list of the most popular websites in the world.

The Global Digital Report 2019
Photo credit Hootsuite

Mobile Users in 2019

According to the Global Digital Report 2019, mobile penetration in the world stands at 67 percent. This means that more than 5.1 billion individuals around the world have made mobile calls. However, smartphone technology has slowly replaced the feature phones considerably. This is because the number of smartphone users is now two-fold compared to the original phones. This explains why the mobile app market is flourishing.

Africa Digital Report 2019

The global digital Report 2019 gave a complete digital picture for Africa. Among the most important areas included the following;

  • Out of the total population of 1.304 billion in Africa, 80 percent of Africans (1 billion) use mobile phones, an increase of 5.2 percent. 51 million more people started using phones.
  • Internet penetration in Africa stands at 36 percent where 473 million Africans have access to the internet. The growth rate was 8.7 percent, an additional 38 million people growing the pool.
  • The number of people actively using social media in Africa stands at 216 million (representing 17 percent penetration) with 202 million of these (16 percent) accessing it using their mobile devices. Active social media users grew by 13 percent (25 million people) while those using social media on their devices grew by 17 percent (30 million Africans).
  • Internet penetration was highest in Southern Africa (51 percent), followed by Northern Africa (50 percent), Western Africa (41 percent), eastern Africa (32 percent) and lastly Central Africa (12 percent). Social media penetration shows the same trend but northern Africa leads while southern comes second.

In conclusion, The Global Digital Report shows that mobile, social media and internet technologies continue to improve worldwide. Voice control technology is also bound to improve significantly. However, some parts in Africa still have low penetration in all technologies. This presents an opportunity for African countries to develop strong digital strategies to tackle the digital divide. Although some of the worst countries in term of digital development and penetration fall in Africa, the very worst of them is not; North Korea.</

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