Telemedia Johannesburg, announced this week and scheduled to take place in the first week of June 2026, comes as the African market explodes into one of the hottest on the planet. Teaming up with South Africa’s self-regulator WASPA, World Telemedia aims to bring together the power players and innovators from across sub-Saharan Africa for three days of thought-leadership, conference, exhibition and working groups, as well, of course, as networking that will not only showcase the opportunity in the region, but also set the agenda for the years ahead.
And the timing couldn’t be more prescient. Only this week, Vodafone posted its H1 FY26 results and made a special point of singling out the booming African market for the increase in revenues seen by the carrier.
Vodafone is just one recent example of the potential shown across telecoms and technology in Africa. Next week’s AfricaCom – appropriately renamed The African Tech Festival and featuring our own head of strategy and WASPA board member Anzelle Robertson – is also testament to this and sets in motion a deeper focus at World Telemedia of servicing the this burgeoning market.
With Telemedia events already dedicated to MENA and Asia in Dubai in April 2026 and Europe in Barcelona in February and Marbella in October, World Telemedia’s move to open up the wider African market points to just how global this events and publishing company has become.
The African opportunity
So, why Africa and why now? The African telemedia services market is projected to generate billions of dollars in revenue by 2025, with the lion’s share of contributions coming from mobile financial services, entertainment and various flavours of ecommerce. Gaming in Africa is already a $2bn industry, while video streaming is rapidly catching up with developed markets in terms of user numbers. Online shopping is also rapidly gaining a foothold.
This growth is hardly surprising as it builds on a sector that is already quite strong in many parts of the market. In Southern Africa alone, communication services generated $17bn in 2024, with annual growth projected at 2.3% through 2028. To the East, Ethiopia’s mVAS market is expected to grow from $1.43bn in 2022 to $7.48bn by 2031, reflecting a CAGR of 20.14%. Out west, Nigeria’s telecom market was valued at a staggering $9.1bn in 2022 and continues to grow at a CAGR of 4.6%.
These markets are, as you would expect, driven by consumers – vast swathes of whom are leapfrogging fixed line internet and adopting mobile as the channel to access everything from entertainment to messaging to interacting with utilities. Across the region, smartphone adoption surged by 24% in 2024, with countries like Nigeria (42% increase in smartphone shipments), South Africa (19%) and Egypt (39%) leading this growth.
Mobile money is key
And it is all thanks to mobile money. Mobile financial services are a key driver of mVAS adoption. For instance, Airtel Africa, for example, reports a 29.6% increase in mobile money revenues year-on-year by March 2023. MTN’s MoMo app now connects more than 200 million wallets across 24 African countries, with transaction values jumping from $76bn in 2018 to $204bn in 2022. Figures for 2025 are expected to be much, much higher.
Carrier billing, too, is already a bedrock of the broader African telemedia market. In 2024, the number of people across the whole of the Middle East and Africa using carrier billing was approximately 742.5 million, a figure projected to grow to 803 million by 2027.
Specific figures for Africa alone are not yet available, but the continent is a primary driver of the MEA region. Carrier billing is particularly important in Africa because a large percentage of the population is unbanked and lacks access to traditional payment methods like credit cards. Unbanked consumers represented 58% of all carrier-billed transactions in 2024, highlighting the technology’s role in financial inclusion.
Countries like South Africa, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo have high rankings in the direct carrier billing market and the use of carrier billing is expected to continue growing rapidly in the region due to increasing smartphone penetration and the high demand for digital content and services, such as gaming and subscriptions.
M-PESA and superapps
And then there is M-PESA. M-PESA is Africa’s most successful mobile payment service, having debuted in Kenya in 2007 and grown to become a key driver of financial inclusion with millions of customers in seven countries.
In the current reporting period, M-PESA contributed 42.9% of parent company Safaricom’s service revenue, totalling $600mn, a 16.6% increase over the previous six months.
This service, perhaps more than any other, is what has made telemedia in Africa possible: allowing millions of unbanked consumers to sample the digital economy and they have really taken to it. Such too is its reach that M-PESA is also now looking at how it can also integrate DCB into what it offers, as Jason Masai, M-Pesa Africa’s head of product, told us when we caught up with him at the Carrier Billing Summit. He also outlined how M-PESA is looking at creating a superapp that will bring together payments, content, entertainment, the ability to book things and much more.
Vodafone, too, has seen the potential of superapps and is already looking to scale its VodaPay offering to also tap into this ‘one app to rule them all’ mindset. What started out as a payment tool has become an app that allows users to manage their money, buy from online sellers, buy airtime, pay bills and earn rewards in South Africa, but plans to integrate many of these services into M-PESA in Kenya and Tanzania.
Meeting the challenges together
There are, of course, challenges to growth across the sub-Sharan market. Countries like Ethiopia and conflict zones such as Sudan face slower growth due to limited infrastructure and economic instability that go with emerging markets. Regulation – too much and too little – can also be a barrier to growth.
However, the telemedia community is already working as a team to tackle a lot of this. Already we have seen Evina celebrate four years of the DCB security company’s work with WASPA in South Africa creating a market that drives increased investment in telemedia services. The addition of compliance monitoring through a partnership between WASPA and MCP Insight will only push this market further.
The rest of the continent is watching on to see how partnerships like these play out in South Africa and you can bet that similar partnerships will be formed across the region opening up more markets to even deeper investment.
And this is the genius of the timing of Telemedia Johannesburg: it is the place for all the stakeholders in the sub-Saharan market to come together to educate, learn and do business to make this market reach – or even exceed – its wild potential. You can’t afford to miss it.
