Abstract—South Africa and Mauritius both possess among the most advanced mobile telecommunication industries in Africa. However, advanced mobile data services have still not entered the lives of most mobile subscribers. The research objective was to investigate the use and adoption of a number of data services, including content services, web browsing, email, MMS, mobile games, mobile banking and mobile chats in South Africa and Mauritius. We also list the major obstacles and inhibitors mentioned by the respondents as well as what they perceived could be done to promote use and adoption of mobile services. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods have been used. A research instrument was been designed to assess the usage pattern of mobile data services in both countries while a qualitative analysis allowed richer insights to the quantitative findings. The targeted sample included both students and staff from a university and corporate users from various business sectors. The research findings were that, apart from SMS, users were indeed generally slow to adopt the more advanced 3G data services. Interestingly, despite the socio-economic differences in the two countries, many of the barriers identified were similar.

Index Terms—Mobile Data Service adoption, barriers to MCommerce, M-Commerce enablers, South Africa, Mauritius.

Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town.

Cite: Hiranjali Ramburn and Jean-Paul Van Belle, "Use and adoption of Mobile Data Services in Africa: An Empirical Study in Mauritius and South Africa," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 28-34, 2011.