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World Bank figures put smartphone penetration at 20.35% in 2024
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Technological Transformation
Most African digital strategies begin with infrastructure: a fibre backbone, a data centre, a tower programme. Mozambique's 2026 story is different. In a single year the country has issued a national roaming regulation, a data-centre regulation, a cloud-computing regulation, a new telecom licensing regime, a licensing system for digital platforms, a public device-authentication database and, due in November, a tariff-monitoring system. The government is writing the rules of a digital market faster than the market itself is growing.
That is partly a choice and partly a necessity. Communications and Digital Transformation Minister Américo Muchanga has said plainly that responsibility for investing in infrastructure lies with the private sector, and that the government's role is to set policies and regulations that attract that investment. The state's balance sheet explains why. This article looks at what Mozambique's regulate-first approach can achieve, where it runs into limits, and what to watch as it meets a market in which roughly four in five people are still offline.
The baseline: coverage without use
By most measures of network reach, Mozambique does not look like a laggard. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) data put 2G, 3G and 4G population coverage at 88%, 86% and 84% in 2024, with 5G at 10%. The ITU also estimates that 79.9% of the population owned a mobile phone that year. Yet internet penetration was only 20.5%. DataReportal's Digital 2026 report gives a similar picture: 7.12 million internet users at the end of 2025, or 19.8% of the population, and 4.10 million social media identities, or 11.4%.
The gap between the network and its use is driven by devices, prices and geography. World Bank figures put smartphone penetration at 20.35% in 2024. The GSMA's Mobile Connectivity Index gave Mozambique 30.1 out of 100 for handset affordability; for the poorest 40% of the population, the affordability score for the cheapest internet-enabled handset fell to 18.3. The regulator INCM reports telecom access at 80% in urban areas but only 20% in rural areas, and the World Bank estimates that 61% of Mozambicans live in rural areas.
One further number shows how much of the market has been formalised. DataReportal counts 19.1 million active cellular connections in late 2025, equivalent to 53.1% of the population, well below the phone-ownership figure and unusually low for the region, where SIM counts often exceed population. Part of the explanation is likely regulatory. In September 2024 INCM announced biometric re-registration, using fingerprints and facial recognition, for the country's then roughly 15 million subscribers. It cited fraudulent registration documents and more than 10,000 pirated devices being activated each week. In an earlier clean-up, operators blocked 5.7 million SIM cards that had not been registered by the deadline. Mozambique's subscriber base is smaller than its neighbours' partly because it has been cleaned.
The rulebook, layer by layer
Shared networks. Under the National Roaming Regulation (Decree No. 12/2025), INCM launched a national roaming pilot on 23 April 2026 with all three mobile operators: Vodacom Mozambique, Movitel and the state-owned Tmcel. Customers could use a rival's network where their own had no coverage. The pilot was deliberately narrow: voice and SMS only, no mobile data, in five localities (Quissico Sede, Ntemangau, Cachembe Sede, Muirrua Nacala a Velha Sede and Chissimbire) until 15 May. Its purpose was technical monitoring of interoperability and service quality before wider phases. For a country where building one tower per operator in every remote district will never pay, mandatory sharing is the cheapest source of coverage available.
Fines as financing. In July 2026 the government adopted by decree a new Regulation on the Granting of Telecommunications Licences and Scarce Resources. INCM confirmed on 21 August that it is now in force. Its most unusual provision lets the regulator convert fines imposed on operators, typically for missing coverage or quality-of-service obligations, into universal service obligations, with the amount redirected to projects in underserved areas. The logic is that an operator that fails to build where it promised pays for building somewhere else rather than paying into the treasury.
Hosting and cloud. Decree No. 71/2025 approved a Data Centre Regulation and Decree No. 72/2025 a Cloud Computing Regulation, both dated 31 December 2025, as part of a digital-transformation package led by the National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (INTIC). The data-centre rules set security, resilience and business-continuity requirements, create an online portal and a single operating title for licensing, impose civil-liability insurance, and add sovereignty provisions for data held abroad and for information classified as a state secret. A data-centre licence also covers cloud services, so operators do not need a separate cloud licence. Existing facilities have one year from entry into force to comply.
Platforms. On 8 June 2026 INTIC issued its first 19 licences to electronic service providers, digital platform operators and related entities, from about 170 registered companies still under evaluation. The fee is modest at entry, equivalent to one national minimum wage, but licensees then owe an annual contribution of 1% of revenue from the following fiscal year. That makes the platform economy a direct source of regulatory funding.
Devices and prices. In August 2026 INCM launched a public IMEI database, backed by the GSMA's global device registry, so buyers can check whether a handset is genuine before purchasing it. It follows years of problems with counterfeit phones, including a 2022 raid on an illegal factory in Maputo that was assembling fake iPhones and assigning IMEI numbers. In September, responding to widespread complaints that mobile data bundles were being used up suspiciously fast, INCM said a Tariff Management System would go live in November. It will let consumers compare packages, show the effective price of each service including its conditions and validity, and let the regulator check that advertised validity periods are honoured. INCM is also restructuring bundle designs to make them fairer and more predictable.
The build targets the rules are meant to unlock
The regulations serve a set of coverage goals. The Internet Para Todos (Internet for All) initiative, launched by President Daniel Chapo on 28 March 2025, targets 80% mobile penetration, 95% territorial coverage and 99% network availability by 2030. It also sets speed benchmarks: 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps for 5G, 10 to 100 Mbps for 4G and 0.1 to 10 Mbps for 3G. On 17 August 2026 the ministry announced plans to reach at least 300 more localities, connect up to 4,000 schools and deploy around 10,000 new 4G and 5G access points. It reported 149 localities and 418 schools already connected. Through the Universal Access Service Fund (FSAU), the government began deploying 60 rural base stations in nine provinces in October 2025.
The ministry also says it will make it easier for low-Earth-orbit satellite operators and independent tower companies to enter the market. Commercial satellite service is already a factor: Vodacom Mozambique signed a resale partnership with Starlink in November 2025 that bundles satellite backhaul with rural 4G sites. At the Infra for Africa Forum in Dar es Salaam on 5–6 August, Muchanga set out five priorities: connectivity, energy, a regional AI data centre able to serve Southern Africa, public access to devices, and an investment-friendly regulatory environment. The data-centre and cloud decrees are the legal groundwork for the third of these.
Where the rails already run: mobile money
Payments show what well-run regulation can produce. The three mobile wallets, Vodacom's M-Pesa, Movitel's e-Mola and Tmcel's mKesh, have been interoperable since July 2022. Banco de Moçambique's financial-inclusion indicators put mobile-money accounts at 118.7 per 100 adults in the second quarter of 2025. By the end of June 2026 the central bank counted 494,955 e-money agents, up 27,333 in a single quarter, out of 532,761 financial access points in total. That compares with 650 bank branches, 1,291 ATMs and 31,316 point-of-sale terminals. M-Pesa alone reported more than 6 million active users and 54,000 agents as of September 2025.
The agent network reaches places that the internet does not. That matters for sequencing. In Mozambique, as in much of the region, the first digital service most people use regularly is financial, delivered over USSD on a basic phone. A regulatory strategy that makes data cheaper, devices more trustworthy and coverage shared is, in effect, trying to move that existing payments user base onto the internet.
Why the state regulates rather than builds
The fiscal numbers explain the division of labour. The Ministry of Finance's 2027 Fiscal Risks Report, published in September, estimates that the public wage bill will absorb 65.3% of tax revenue in 2027 and debt service another 30.7%. That leaves about four meticais in every hundred for goods and services, transfers, domestic investment and emergencies. The same report records a 0.2% contraction in 2025 and projects growth of only 0.6% in 2026 and 1.54% in 2027 under its baseline, with the risk of recession in an extreme scenario. Growth is forecast to reach 9.5% in 2029 with the gas projects, but only 3.7% without them.
A government in that position cannot bankroll 10,000 access points. What it can do is lower the cost and risk of private investment: shared networks, clear licensing, predictable hosting rules, and universal-service money that operators generate themselves. The regulate-first strategy follows directly from these constraints.
The risks in a rules-heavy approach
There are real risks. The first is capacity. INCM and INTIC now administer roaming, licensing, universal service, data-centre compliance, platform fees, device checks and tariff monitoring. With only 19 of roughly 170 platform applicants licensed by June, the backlog is already visible. Rules that cannot be enforced consistently tend to be enforced selectively.
The second is cost pass-through. A 1% revenue levy on platforms, compliance and insurance costs for data centres, and coverage obligations for operators are all reasonable individually. Together, in a market where affordability is the binding constraint, they can raise the prices that the tariff system is meant to push down.
The third is sequencing. The national roaming pilot covered voice and SMS only, while the adoption gap is about data. Until shared networks carry data, the rule that best addresses rural coverage will do little for the internet-use figure that matters most.
What to watch
Four markers will show whether the strategy is working. First, whether national roaming moves beyond its five-locality pilot to a nationwide phase that includes mobile data. Second, whether the first fine-to-universal-service conversion is announced, with a named project and amount. Third, whether the Tariff Management System goes live in November and is followed by measurable changes in bundle pricing and validity. Fourth, whether DataReportal's next count shows internet use moving meaningfully above 20%. Mozambique has written an unusually complete rulebook for a small digital market. The test now is whether that rulebook brings in enough private investment to close the gap between the 84% of people covered by 4G and the one in five who actually use the internet.
