Free Reads Phone Costs & Power Cuts Keep 906 Million Africans Offline Despite Coverage Gains By Henry Nzekwe  |  September 23, 2026 Africa has spent a decade and billions of dollars building mobile networks. The result is a continent where 92% of the population lives within reach of a mobile broadband signal. Yet only 36% of Africans use the internet at all, leaving roughly 906 million people in a strange limbo. They are covered, but they are not connected. The GSMA and the Partnership for Digital Access in Africa call this the usage gap, and a new roadmap released this week argues it is now the central challenge for the continent’s digital future. The coverage gap, the 122 million people beyond any network, is shrinking, but the usage gap is not. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between coverage and actual use is more than double the global average, according to the GSMA’s State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2026 report. The roadmap, developed by GSMA Intelligence and launched at the United Nations General Assembly…