With 86,600,000 mobile subscriptions, Ethiopia is the biggest telecom market in East Africa today, accounting for 27.49% of the region’s 314,988,917 subscriptions in 2024.
This is contained in the Africa Telecom 50 Report 2024 (East Africa), a ranking of the leading mobile network operators (MNOs) in East Africa, based on the most recently available data on their mobile subscriptions.
The report covered the period up till January 31, 2025.
Tanzania is the 2nd biggest market with 80,662,041 subscriptions, while Kenya comes 3rd with 71,375,093. These top three countries account for 238,637,134 mobile subscriptions or 75.76% of the market in East Africa in 2024.
The other sizable markets in the region during the period under review are Uganda with 37,151,000 mobile subscriptions and Rwanda with 13,480,095 subscriptions.
The remaining seven countries of the region (Somalia, Burundi, South Sudan, Comoros, Eritrea, Djibouti and Seychelles) each have a subscription base of less than 10 million.
The report also shows that Ethio Telecom of Ethiopia is the biggest telco in the region, with 80,500,000 mobile subscriptions, followed by Safaricom Kenya with 46,567,767 subscriptions.
Vodacom Tanzania comes in the third position with 24,708,053. TIGO Tanzania and MTN Uganda rank 4th and 5th with 23,506,864 and 21,551,000 respectively.
The five other MNOs which make up the top 10 in East Africa in 2024 are Airtel Kenya with 21,517,842 subscriptions, Airtel Tanzania 19,824,410, Airtel Uganda 15,600,000, Halotel Tanzania 11,031,495, and MTN Rwanda 8,331,304.
Beyond its raw numbers of 86,600,000 mobile subscriptions, Ethiopia, East Africa’s biggest telecom market as at 2024, falls short in teledensity in the region.
Teledensity measures the number of active telephone lines available to each person in a country at any given year.
With a population of 132,059,767 (based on data from Worldometer as at October 31, 2024), the country has a current teledensity of 65.58%, ranking 7th in the region.
On average, the Africa Telecom 50 Report 2024 (East Africa) shows that more telephones are available to people, per capita, in Seychelles, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Comoros and Uganda during the period under review than to people in Ethiopia.
Since the advent of telephony in the country more than a century ago, the Ethiopian government had shut out competitors outside the country from its telecom market until August 2022 when it opened the space for Safaricom Kenya.
The state-owned operator, Ethio Telecom, had therefore monopolized the entire telecom space all this while, and even today, it still accounts for 92.96% of the market.
Compared to the other big East African telecom markets of Tanzania and Kenya, with a teledensity of 117.65% and 126.48% respectively, Ethiopia has plenty of catching up to do in this critical telecom metric. In working out this maths, Ethiopia will require about 68,000,000 more mobile subscriptions in order to catch up with Tanzania’s teledensity as at today.
As for that of Kenya, it would require about 81,000,000 extra telephone lines. Can the country’s two operators (Ethio Telecom and Safaricom Ethiopia) lead the charge to attain such a threshold? Or does the country need to open its telecom space further for one or two more big-muscle operators to come in?
While announcing the release of the Africa Telecom 50 Report 2024 (East Africa) in Abuja, Nigeria, Mr. Frederick Apeji, the CEO of Alford Conferences Limited, explained that, “In compiling the mobile subscription figures for each of the licensed and active mobile network operators (MNOs) in the 12 countries of East Africa, we relied, first of all, on the market share data of these MNOs supplied by the telecommunications industry regulator of these countries.”
Apeji added that,
“The telecom regulator of three of them (Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda) have such data published on their website; making the collation for their MNOs seamless and accurate. We commend these regulators, and we encourage the regulator of the nine other countries to take a cue from this. In those countries with no updated information by their regulator (Ethiopia, Uganda, Somalia, Burundi, South Sudan, Comoros, Eritrea, Djibouti and Seychelles), we relied on the most recent data supplied by the MNOs themselves. And when neither the regulator nor the operators have updated information on this subject, we relied on various online news websites and other online information sources.”
The annual Africa Telecom 50 Report is published by REVENUE Magazine, one of the trade publications of Alford Conferences Limited.
The first edition, Africa Telecom 50 Report 2023, was published in April 2024 and uploaded on our website, www.alfordevents.com/Reports.
The second edition, Africa Telecom 50 Report 2024, is expected to be published in April 2025. The annual report offers information and insights on the state of the telecom industry in each of the five regions of Africa: Central Africa, East Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa and West Africa.
