The Cheapest Way to Get More Africans Online May Not Be a New Smartphone

Africa still has a smartphone affordability problem, and the industry is trying to solve it by making new devices cheaper. That approach is now running into a market moving the other way.

The GSMA estimates  that an entry-level smartphone cost 26% of monthly income per capita in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, rising to 64% for the poorest 40%. In March 2026, the GSMA and its Handset Affordability Coalition selected Nigeria, the DRC, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda to pilot $40 4G smartphones, with GSMA Intelligence estimating that such a device could bring another 20 million people within reach of mobile internet.

But the new-device track is under pressure. Africa shipped 84.4 million smartphones in 2025, 81% of them priced below $200, according to Omdia. Shipments then fell 7% year on year in the second quarter of 2026, the market’s first annual contraction in three years, and Omdia now forecasts a 26% decline across the full year as component inflation, memory shortages and currency weakness hit the low-end segment hardest. IDC expects global shipments to fall 13.9% in 2026, which would be the steepest annual decline the market has recorded.

That makes the devices already in circulation more important, not less. Pre-owned and refurbished phones offer a route to smartphone ownership that does not depend on the price of new hardware holding steady.

This #TechTalkThursday edition examines how Africa’s pre-owned smartphone market is taking shape, what formal resale and refurbishment are beginning to solve, and whether extending the life of existing devices can become a reliable part of closing the continent’s access gap.

A Used Smartphone Changes What Affordability Buys

The value of a pre-owned phone is not simply that it costs less. It is that it gives a buyer access to a device that would be out of reach new.

The numbers make the gap concrete. Kenya’s Badili sells certified refurbished handsets at 40% to 60% below new retail prices, with a 12-month warranty and a 32-point inspection. On that discount, a buyer with a $200 budget is not choosing between entry-level Android models. They are choosing between an iPhone 11, a Galaxy S22 and a Pixel 6a.

That is a different proposition from the $40 smartphone. A cheaper new device lowers the entry price for a first-time buyer. A secondary market widens the range of devices that fit inside an existing budget.

The distinction matters because the cheapest available phone is not necessarily the most useful one. Processing power, storage, battery capacity, camera quality and compatibility with current applications all determine whether a handset can actually support the services a user needs. A device that cannot run a banking app or hold a charge through a working day has solved the price problem and nothing else.

The secondary market shifts the question from “what is the cheapest new phone I can buy?” to “what is the most capable phone I can afford?”

“If you don’t have a smartphone, you are excluded from the digital economy, let alone AI. The biggest barrier to digital inclusion in Africa is not network coverage; it is the cost of smartphones. We have networks covering millions of people who still rely on feature phones because they simply cannot afford a smartphone.”

-Shameel Joosub, CEO, Vodacom Group

Consumers are already voting this way. Counterpoint Research found that Africa’s used smartphone market grew 6% year on year in the first half of 2025, the fastest growth of any region globally, against roughly 1% in the United States, Europe and Japan. Used Apple devices grew 7%, driven by demand for the iPhone 13 and later. The continent’s second-hand market is not absorbing obsolete stock. It is absorbing recent, capable hardware.

The Informal Market Solves the Price Problem and Leaves the Buyer Holding the Risk

Most of that activity still happens outside any formal channel.

Informal sellers offer low prices and little else. Buyers get no verified battery health, no guarantee that internal components are genuine, no warranty and no record of where the device came from. Consumers use these channels anyway, because formal retail prices remain out of reach.

Speaking at a Digital Africa Summit roundtable in Shanghai, Nigerian Communications Commission Chairman Chief Idris Ibikunle Olorunnimbe framed the grey market as a symptom rather than a crime in isolation.

“When formally approved devices are priced out of reach by foreign-exchange volatility, import duties and thin distribution, people buy whatever they can find.”

-Chief Idris Ibikunle Olorunnimbe, Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission

Enforcement alone does not fix this. A buyer who cannot afford a verified device does not stop buying. They buy an unverified one. Closing the grey market means giving people something trustworthy at a price they can meet, which requires both a supply of devices and a reason to believe in them.

Trade-Ins and Refurbishment Are Building the Supply

A functioning secondary market needs a steady flow of handsets and a system for preparing them for another owner. Several models are now doing that work.

Trade-in programmes capture devices at the point of upgrade, before they disappear into a drawer or an unverified resale channel. Badili runs a pricing algorithm that values a used handset on brand, model and condition, then puts that device back through repair and resale. South Africa’s Vodacom operates its Good as New programme along similar lines, positioning certified pre-owned devices as both an affordability play and an e-waste reduction measure. M-KOPA , which has disbursed over $1.6 billion in customer credit in Kenya alone, refurbishes returned handsets locally and resells them with financing attached.

Local refurbishment capacity is also getting institutional backing. Badili raised $400,000 from Proparco’s Bridge by Digital Africa facility, one of several government and development-finance efforts aimed at building refurbishment infrastructure on the continent rather than importing it.

The shift these models represent is structural. A phone can now move through trade-in, assessment, repair, certification and resale, instead of simply changing hands between two people who have no way of verifying anything about it.

Trust is What Turns Supply into a Market

Supply on its own does not produce buyers. Someone has to be willing to spend real money on a device that has already had an owner.

Certification and warranties do most of that work at the retail end. A 12-month warranty on a refurbished handset transfers risk from the buyer back to the seller, which is precisely what the informal market cannot offer at any price.

Verification does the rest, and it operates at a different scale. The GSMA Device Registry uses IMEI tracking to identify stolen and counterfeit handsets globally, which is what stops Africa from becoming a destination for hardware blocked elsewhere. Regulators are connecting national systems to it. Nigeria’s NCC uses its Device Management System and Type Approval Regulations to screen out non-approved devices entering the market.

Financing closes the remaining gap, because a verified device still has to be payable.

“It is not about punishment, it is about enablement. What we are seeing is that financiers want to provide devices to consumers to enable these 320 million African adults to access the internet and smart technology. But there is no credit vetting. So how do they do this? We need to remove the risk for them, and that is where Trustonic comes into play.”

-Craige Fleischer, Executive Vice President, Middle East Africa, Trustonic

Put together, these pieces align across the device lifecycle: financing spreads the cost, trade-ins recover value at upgrade, refurbishment restores the handset, certification and warranties protect the next buyer, and structured resale moves the device into a lower price bracket. The result is a market that can generate more than one ownership cycle from the same piece of hardware.

Price is the First Test of Affordability, Not the Last

A device that fails eighteen months after purchase was never affordable.

Battery degradation, expensive or unavailable repairs and discontinued software support can all render a cheap handset unusable well before its owner is ready to replace it. For a consumer operating on tight margins, one component failure erases the saving that made the device attractive in the first place, and they re-enter the market having gained nothing.

This applies as much to the $40 new phone as to the $150 refurbished one. Repairability, local spare-part supply and the length of the software support window determine whether a device stays useful, and none of them appear on the price tag. A secondary market makes this visible in a way the new-device market does not: a phone only has resale value if it still works.

Building a Multi-Track Route to Device Access

“Getting smartphone affordability right is not a precursor to the digital economy. It is the digital economy.”

– Caroline Mbugua, Senior Director of Public Policy and Communications for Africa, GSMA

With new-device shipments contracting and component costs rising, the secondary market is shifting from an alternative to a load-bearing part of how Africans get connected. Closing the device gap now needs three tracks running at once:

• Lowering entry barriers for new devices through targeted hardware initiatives, tax reductions and consumer financing.

• Extending the productive life of existing hardware through repairability, local component supply and longer software support windows.

• Formalising the secondary market through certification standards, trade-in systems and warranties that protect second-hand buyers.

Africa’s digital inclusion challenge is not solved by pushing more smartphones onto the continent. It is solved by building a system where the devices already here last longer, move further, and keep more people connected than the person who bought them first.