About twenty three years ago a 22 year old engineer by name Neil Papworth, was the first person to send a commercial SMS over Vodafone’s network in the UK. Although the concept of SMS had been developed as far back as 1984.
The technology was originally developed to be used as an in-company service for staff to send messages to one another. Over the years, SMS has taken a life of its own and rapidly evolved to become a billion dollar industry.
With the advent of the mobile revolution in Africa in the mid 2000’s, SMS made a phenomenal impact in Africa. Businesses and NGO’s saw SMS as a key technology for providing Value Added Services (VAS) in healthcare, agriculture, education, mobile commerce, customer alerts and notifications just to mention few in ways that have never been done before. A lot of the success stories emerged from Kenya. A couple also came from Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa among others. Some of the successful projects included: Ushahidi, mPedigree, Esoko, Farmerline, VotoMobile, SMSGH, Nsano and Nandimobile.
The revolution was so strong that tech giants like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia all attempted providing their services via SMS at some point. Let us consider some of the factors that may explain the rise of SMS in Africa:
1. Cost
Cost is a major factor that has hastened the adoption of SMS as an appropriate technology for Africans. Unlike Europe and other developed parts of the world with high smart phone and broadband penetration, Africa’s penetration is now catching up. According to the latest figures from the International Telecommunication Union, Africa has 20.7% internet penetration. Coupled with low smart phone and broadband penetration is the high cost of data. These factors make SMS a relatively inexpensive and reliable technology to use in the African setting.
2. Simplicity & Ease of Use
SMS is quite easy and simple to use. You simply receive a message, read it and reply if you have to. For people who cannot read some of the projects implement an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for them to listen to the message in their local language. SMS is much simpler than smartphone apps where you have to get accustomed to hidden icons and buttons.
3. High Mobile Phone Penetration
Available data shows that Africa has around 70% mobile phone penetration. All these handsets have inbuilt SMS capability. It therefore makes it easy for any business or NGO to leverage the already existing infrastructure to deploy an SMS technology solution.
4. The Availability Of Open Source Technologies
With the availability of SMS technologies such as Asterisk, Kannel, Frontlinesms and numerous easy to use SMS gateways, techies can experiment with an SMS project quickly. These readily available technologies reduce the cost involved in setting up an SMS project especially for NGO’s.
SMS Takes A Down Turn
It is also worth mentioning that available data shows that SMS traffic is dipping globally. According to eMarketer.com, SMS traffic peaked in 2012 to over 7.8 trillion messages per annum and since then, its been on the downturn. This is partly due to the emergence of chat apps like Whatsapp and SnapChat. However in terms of revenue, SMS continues to make inroads. This is due to the inability or unwillingness of these chat apps to monetize their platforms.
Looking into the future it is quite clear that Person to Person (P2P) SMS will decline. However businesses will continue to use the technology to send bulk messages otherwise known as application to person SMS. Africa will continue to be home for this nifty technology for the foreseeable future and anyone who thinks SMS is dead and wants to walk away should know that SMS is still a billion dollar industry.