Nigeria’s Mobile-Cellular Rate Ranks 22nd of 25 Tracked African Markets. Eighteen of the 21 With No Spotify Chart At All Rank Above It

Nigeria has 70.76 mobile-cellular subscriptions per 100 people, the 22nd-highest rate of 25 tracked African markets. Eighteen of the 21 African markets with no published Spotify daily chart have a higher rate than the market that anchors Spotify’s heaviest-streaming African chart. The measure is the World Bank’s mobile-cellular-subscriptions indicator, compared row by row against which African markets currently carry a published Spotify daily chart.

World Bank indicator IT.CEL.SETS.P2, most recent reading per country, mostly 2024. Markets with a published Spotify daily chart are Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and Morocco.

Show the numbers

Country	Mobile-cellular subscriptions per 100 people
Cote d'Ivoire	183.88
South Africa	179.34
Mauritius	172.68
Botswana	164
Morocco	153.06
Tanzania	126.56
Kenya	126.48
Benin	125.94
Senegal	123.89
Tunisia	117.61
Burkina Faso	116.59
Algeria	115.46
Ghana	113.65
Mali	112.12
Zambia	108.70
Cameroon	108.21
Egypt	97.13
Zimbabwe	94.25
Rwanda	93.20
Namibia	85.16
Uganda	83.17
Nigeria	70.76
Angola	69.70
Ethiopia	65.08
Mozambique	49.50

Source: World Bank open data, indicator IT.CEL.SETS.P2; this desk's own record of which African markets Spotify publishes a daily Top 200 for, retrieved 14 Nov 2026 · download the data

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Spotify publishes a daily chart for four African markets: Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and Morocco. A reasonable guess at why those four and not the other 21 tracked here would start with connectivity: no chart because too few people have a phone network to stream on. The mobile-cellular data does not support that guess, at least not as a simple threshold. South Africa (179.34 per 100 people) and Morocco (153.06) sit 2nd and 5th of the 25, well above the middle of the distribution, consistent with a connectivity story. But Nigeria, the market that generates the largest single-country stream total on this desk’s active Spotify panel, sits at 70.76, 22nd of 25, below Namibia, Uganda, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, none of which has a Spotify chart at all. Egypt, the fourth charted market, sits at 97.13, 17th of 25, also below several uncharted markets including Ghana, Zambia, Mali and Cameroon.

Put the four charted markets on the same ranking as everyone else and they span almost the full range: 2nd, 5th, 17th and 22nd of 25. A market’s mobile-cellular rate does not predict whether Spotify has chosen to publish a chart for it. Côte d’Ivoire, at 183.88 per 100 people, the single highest rate in this set, has no Spotify chart. Mauritius (172.68) and Botswana (164) do not either. Kenya (126.48), Senegal (123.89), Tunisia (117.61), Algeria (115.46) and Ghana (113.65) all exceed Nigeria’s rate and none of them has a chart. Whatever decided Spotify’s four-market list, it was not simply “which markets have the phones.”

This is a different result from the picture this desk’s own earlier work drew using a different connectivity measure. On individuals using the internet as a share of population, a separate World Bank indicator covering 20 of these markets, Nigeria sits 10th of 20 at 41.21 per cent, squarely in the middle of its distribution rather than near the bottom. The two measures disagree about where Nigeria sits because they measure different things: one counts SIM subscriptions, which can exceed 100 per 100 people where multiple-SIM ownership is common, as it plainly is in Côte d’Ivoire (183.88), South Africa (179.34), Mauritius (172.68) and Botswana (164); the other counts people who report using the internet at all, regardless of how many SIMs they hold. A market can rank low on the first and mid-table on the second if its phone ownership is comparatively single-SIM. Nigeria appears to be exactly that kind of market in this data, and that difference is the reason this piece reports the mobile-cellular figure as its own measure rather than folding it into the internet-penetration figure already on record.

What else could explain this, and does it hold up#

The sharpest challenge to this finding is not which countries sit at the top of the ranking, it is which year Nigeria’s own reading comes from. Nigeria’s mobile-cellular rate was 89.29 in 2021, rose to 99.59 in 2022 and 98.48 in 2023, then fell to 70.76 in 2024, the figure this piece uses throughout because it is the most recent published. None of the other three charted markets moved anything like that much in the same four years: South Africa’s reading moved from 163.13 in 2021 to 179.34 in 2024, with a dip to 160.73 in 2022 along the way; Morocco rose in every year, from 138.91 to 153.06; Egypt rose in every year too, from 84.09 to 97.13.

Substituting Nigeria’s 2023 or 2022 reading for its 2024 one, and holding every other country at its own 2024 figure, moves Nigeria from 22nd of 25 to 17th of 25, and cuts the count of non-charted markets exceeding it from 18 of 21 to 14 of 21, a fall from 85.7 to 66.7 per cent.

What survives that substitution: in all four years, a clear majority of the markets Spotify does not chart, between 66.7 and 85.7 per cent of them, have a higher mobile-cellular rate than Nigeria, the market that drives this desk’s largest single-country Spotify stream total. What does not survive it: the precise scale of the gap in the headline. This piece reports the 2024 figure because it is what the World Bank currently publishes as Nigeria’s most recent reading, not because it is the most dramatic one available, but the reader should know the finding would look meaningfully smaller, not reversed, on the prior year’s number. This World Bank series does not state why Nigeria’s reading fell between 2023 and 2024, and no cause is asserted here.

The second, smaller-magnitude check is whether the ranking is being carried by one or two unusually high readings at the top. It is not. Dropping the single highest reading, Côte d’Ivoire, moves the sample mean by only 2.54 per cent. Dropping the five highest readings, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Mauritius, Botswana and Morocco, which removes two of the four charted markets outright, still moves the mean by only 12.33 per cent against the full 25.

The specific count in the headline survives the same test. Removing those same five highest-ranked markets, which include Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritius and Botswana from the uncharted group, leaves 18 uncharted markets, of which 15 still have a higher mobile-cellular rate than Nigeria. That is 83.3 per cent of the remaining uncharted group, against 85.7 per cent, 18 of 21, before any rows were dropped. The finding does not depend on the markets at the very top of the ranking.

What this piece does not claim: it is not a measure of how many Spotify subscribers are reachable in any of these 25 markets, and it is not a claim about smartphone ownership, data pricing or app availability, any of which could separately gate whether a published chart is commercially worth building. A SIM-subscription count is a count of active lines, not of devices capable of running a streaming app, and this World Bank indicator does not distinguish a basic-phone line from a smartphone line. It also covers a different, and in this pull slightly larger, set of 25 countries than the 20-country set behind this desk’s earlier internet-penetration figure, because not every country reports both indicators in the same year; a market absent from one table is a gap in World Bank reporting for that indicator and year, not a zero.

What this means for artists and independent labels#

Do not read a market’s absence from Spotify’s four-chart list as a verdict on its connectivity, because on this measure it is not one. An artist or label operating in Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritius, Kenya, Senegal, Tunisia, Ghana or any of the other uncharted markets that outrank Nigeria on this measure, a group that holds together across all four years checked above even as its exact size moves, cannot point to a Spotify chart position to demonstrate reach to a brand or sponsor, not because the phones are not there, but because the chart itself is not. That is a product and licensing choice sitting on top of the infrastructure, not a reflection of it, and it means the absence of a chart is a platform gap to route around with other evidence of audience, Shazam or YouTube chart presence, DSP-reported stream counts, or social reach, rather than a signal to wait out until the market “catches up.”