According to telecrunch.com reports, Facebook announced that it now has 100 million active users in Africa, and 80 percent of those come on mobile. That 100 million makes up 50 percent of all Africans connected to the Internet.
That eighty percent of the Facebook users in Africa are connecting via mobile on mobile suggests the continent has largely leapfrogged laptops and is doing a great deal of its computing on small screens.
The news comes just a month after Facebook’s telecom partnership to bring Internet to the 5 billion people still disconnected debuted its Internet.org app in Zambia. The Android app and mobile site offers free access to a set of “basic” Internet services like Wikipedia, Google search, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, as well as local resources about human rights, women’s rights, and civic engagement.
African telecom Airtel fully subsidizes the data charges in hopes that Internet.org’s app will prove to people the value of the internet, and convince them to buy a subscription to the whole web.
The barrier to Internet usage in much of Africa is not access to phones or a data connection, but the prohibitively high cost of data plans. That’s why Facebook is working on these types of free Internet carrier deals as well as ways to lower data expenditures through improved transmission efficiency.
Judging by the 50-percent usage rate in Africa, Facebook could stand to gain billions of users if it can get more of the world on the Internet.
