reply on: ‘We don’t like our money’: The story of the CFA and Bitcoin in Africa \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @KenyaCoin 17 Mar 2022 \ parent \ on: ‘We don’t like our money’: The story of the CFA and Bitcoin in Africa bitcoin

As much as 46% of the Subsaharan population in Africa has a smartphone and, as evidenced, mobile money is booming.

With somewhere around half the population being under 20, that number of smartphone owners might seem a little high. Maybe it was 46% of adult population? Still seems high,... and having learned to not take even a single thing from CoinTelegraph as accurate, without verifying, let's do some verifying!

[/me spends about 30 seconds doing a Google search ....]

Oh ... 46% have a mobile phone subscription. But many (if not most) of those devices are going to be "feature phones", not "smartphones"

By the end of 2020, 495 million people subscribed to mobile services in Sub-Saharan Africa, representing 46% of the region’s population – an increase of almost 20 million on 2019. With more than 40% of the region’s population under the age of 15, young consumers owning a mobile phone for the first time will remain the primary source of growth for the foreseeable future.

https://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/sub-saharan-africa/

After doing another 30 seconds of Googling found:

About 50% of the subscribers are using smartphone devices, per the chart on page 7 of this report:

https://www.gsma.com/mobileeconomy/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/GSMA_ME_SSA_2021_English_Web_Singles.pdf

So, the author of this CoinTelegraph is only off by about 50%.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @KenyaCoin 17 Mar 2022

For Idrissa Seck, a Bitcoin enthusiast and bank payment agent, understanding money is the key to unlocking an understanding of Bitcoin.

That could be the real name of that Bitcoin enthusiast there in Senegal, ... just like Bill Clinton could be the real name of a Bitcoin enthusiast in America. More likely though is that the Bitcoin enthusiast provided the author of the article the name of a former Prime Minister of the country instead of his own name when asked.