The GSM Affiliation (GSMA) stated Nigeria would wish an funding of round $360 million to develop the 4G protection to 98 per cent of the nation’s geographical house.
GSMA, which represents the curiosity of cellular companies throughout the globe, disclosed this in its ‘2024 12 months in Evaluation’ report for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the place it highlighted main developments within the telecom panorama.
The telecoms physique stated geospatial evaluation confirmed that 4G protection in Nigeria improved from 41 per cent in 2019 to 84 per cent in 2024.
“Nonetheless, it’s a lot decrease in rural areas, at 48 per cent. The extra funding wanted to attain 98 per cent protection for 4G in Nigeria at the moment stands at round $360 million,” it acknowledged.
It added that the remaining two per cent of the inhabitants may be very distant and sparsely populated and so will seemingly require different applied sciences like satellites for connectivity.
On the necessity for coverage reforms within the nation’s telecoms house, the GSMA famous that coverage reforms to take away sector-specific taxation on infrastructure and take away retail worth regulation would scale back the funding hole by 44 per cent to $200 million.
It additionally highlighted the significance of demand-side insurance policies similar to 4G system entry and affordability as key in bridging the funding hole.
The physique additionally really useful insurance policies for Nigeria within the areas of telecoms infrastructure safety and elimination of right-of-way charges.
GSMA acknowledged: “If the coverage reforms really useful on this report are adopted altogether, we quantified the enablement impact in accelerating the adoption of cellular broadband by 2030.”
The GSMA additional famous that the consequence from the primary version of its Digital Africa Index gives clear proof that nations with enabling insurance policies and rules and extra importantly have applied these insurance policies by means of political goodwill usually tend to have larger ranges of digital growth, led to by excessive cellular broadband adoption.
“Nonetheless, solely 4 nations (Kenya, Mauritius, Seychelles, and South Africa) have a rating above 50 (the utmost rating being 100),” it acknowledged.
The physique added that almost all nations in Africa have scores beneath 50, that means they’ve important scope to speed up digital transformation with a extra enabling coverage framework.
