Globally, four out of five individuals 10 years or older own a mobile phone. Universal ownership, meaning a penetration rate of over 95 per cent, has been reached in high-income economies. This stands in contrast with low-income economies, where only 56 per cent of the population aged 10 years and over own a mobile phone.
Mobile phones are the most common gateway to the Internet, so the prevalence of mobile ownership can provide an indication of Internet penetration. This is not a one-to-one relation, however: for one thing, people other than the owner may use the phone to access the Internet (e.g. children using the phone of a parent); and some mobile phones are used on a calls-only basis (feature phones, limited subscriptions). Furthermore, some people may own more than one mobile phone. In most countries, the percentage of individuals owning a mobile phone is somewhat higher than the percentage of individuals using the Internet.
That is also the case at the regional level for all six ITU regions. In Europe, the CIS region and the Americas, the mobile phone-Internet use overshoot is small, as both indicators are close to universality already. In the Arab States, the prevalence of mobile phone ownership is 14 percentage points greater than Internet use, while in the Asia-Pacific region it is 11 percentage points greater. In Africa, although 66 per cent of the population own a mobile phone, only 38 per cent are online, a difference of 29 percentage points. Still, the gap is shrinking in all regions, as growth in Internet use continues to outpace growth in mobile phone ownership.
The gender gap in mobile phone ownership is comparable with that in Internet use. Globally, 77 per cent of females and 82 per cent of males aged 10 and over own a mobile phone, giving a gender parity score (0.93, i.e. skewed against women) that is marginally lower than the corresponding score for Internet use (0.94). As with Internet use, progress on gender parity in mobile phone ownership has been uneven in the past three years . Globally, women are about 7 per cent less likely to own a mobile phone than men – down from 9.4 per cent in 2021. Among those not owning mobile phones, women outnumber men by 31 per cent. As with Internet use, gender parity is strongly correlated with income levels. The lowest gender parity scores are observed in low-income countries, the LDCs and the LLDCs. Encouragingly, these are also the regions that have registered the most progress since 2021.