Smartphones Cost 76% of Monthly Income in sub-Saharan Africa

The cost of an entry-level internet-enabled smartphone has risen to the equivalent of 76 percent of average monthly income in Sub-Saharan Africa, putting access to mobile internet beyond the reach of millions of low-income consumers across the region. The development, contained in the Global System for Mobile Communications Association's (GSMA) State of Mobile Internet Connectivity (SOMIC) Report 2026, comes as rising memory and chipset costs push up prices of affordable smartphones and threaten efforts to close Africa's digital divide. The report showed that while billions of people now live within mobile broadband coverage, a large proportion remain offline because they cannot afford an internet-enabled device. Globally, about 3.4 billion people do not use mobile internet despite more than 90 per cent of them living in areas covered by mobile broadband networks, and GSMA identified handset affordability as the single biggest barrier to mobile internet adoption across surveyed low- and middle-income countries.

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