Chair’s statement
Investing in transforming lives
Our purpose of transforming lives is achieved by connecting and empowering millions of people around us – while unlocking great growth opportunities for our stakeholders and our business.
Sunil Bharti Mittal
Chair
Airtel Africa is investing in essential telecoms, data and mobile money services to unlock the massive potential of the markets we serve. Through these services the company is transforming lives by connecting the unconnected, reaching the financially excluded and bridging the digital divide.
Airtel Africa acts as a partner to the young, fast-growing populations of our 14 markets and their governments, helping to build a shared prosperous digital future that promises growth for Africa’s people, businesses and economies as well as for our business.
This has been a year of further significant progress. The expansion of our network coverage, which now extends to over 37,100 sites across the region, has connected more people than ever to data, voice and mobile money services – and through this, our customer base has grown by 8.7% while voice usage and data usage have also seen strong growth. Our ongoing investment in Airtel Money is providing financial inclusion to more customers than ever before with over 17 billion transactions reaching $136bn in 2024/25.
These significant achievements are made possible by the hard work and dedication of everyone at Airtel Africa. Yet, across our markets, there is a substantial and unmet need – especially, for data and mobile money, the engines of connectivity and growth. Over the next five years 77 million more young people will join our markets, ready to contribute to the digital economy. We must ensure that the market is ready with the communications products and services that will power their education, work and home lives.
I’m proud that Airtel Africa will continue to invest to meet these needs, unlocking growth and opportunity for our customers and for our business.
Focused on customer experience
Our customers are at the heart of what we do. This year, we refreshed our strategy to underline this focus, reinforcing the need for every Airtel Africa employee to consider how they can enhance customers’ experiences of our services, every day.
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Across our markets there is still huge unmet need, especially for data and mobile money – and 77 million more young people will join our markets over the next five years, ready to contribute to the digital economy. I’m proud that Airtel Africa will continue to invest to meet those needs, unlocking growth and opportunity for our customers and for our business.
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Millions of people are now tapping into the possibilities created by data – for enterprise, entertainment, education, financial services and more. At the same time customers are focused on affordability and service with high expectations around reliability, data security and connection speeds. To meet these expectations, we must ensure that our services are affordable, fast, dependable and safe.
Digitising and simplifying the user experience of our products is an important priority in every one of the company’s offerings. Airtel Africa draws on the expertise and experience of the wider Bharti Airtel ecosystem to deliver products and solutions, alongside its own digital capabilities. This year has seen innovations such as the launch of the Airtel AI Spam Alert Service in Nigeria, the first product of its kind in Africa to harness the power of artificial intelligence to protect our customers from spam – read more in progress against our strategy. Focused improvements to MyAirtel App are driving adoption and penetration, outlined in our mobile money business review. Airtel Money has introduced or strengthened its products that deliver financial empowerment to our customers, including microloans, savings tools and insurance services – read more in progress against our strategy.
Continuing Board oversight
Our refreshed strategy reflects the vision of our CEO Sunil Taldar, and was developed with the supervision and approval of the Board, including at our Board strategy session in November 2024. I discuss Sunil’s appointment and other evolutions to our management team in more detail in my governance introduction – but here, I would like to highlight Sunil’s leadership of our strategy for growth. This customer-centric approach, combined with rigorous cost optimisation and operational execution, has served us well through a year in which macro-economic disruptions continued in some of our markets, delivering margin resilience and strong constant currency growth.
The Board was also active in a range of other governance issues this year, including approving the company’s succession planning and people agenda, reviewing and challenging internal controls and risk management frameworks, and closely monitoring the risks and opportunities for Airtel Money. The Board’s activities and the outcomes for stakeholders are described in the Board’s focus in 2024/25.
Maintaining our momentum on sustainability
Our business strategy is underpinned by sustainability ambitions set out in 2021, which contribute to six of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Our Sustainability Report 2025, available on our website at www.airtel.africa, gives stakeholders a transparent account of our commitments and progress. The Board’s role in upholding our environmental, social and governance responsibilities is described in the governance structures section of this Annual Report.
This year saw another important milestone, with the launch of the Airtel Africa Foundation, Airtel Africa’s philanthropic arm. The aims of the Foundation are described in the Airtel Africa Foundation section – and, on a personal note, I welcome the Foundation’s focus on education, in particular, which has been a long-cherished area of focus for me. It’s my firm belief that education is the transformative enabler of social and economic progress. To-date, Airtel Africa’s partnership with UNICEF has reached 20 million young people to provide them with access to high-quality digital educational resources, free of cost. It creates the opportunity to make a difference to whole communities and societies as well as to the young people whose lives we reach directly.
The Foundation has also launched the Airtel Africa fellowship programme, which supports undergraduate students as part of building advanced IT skills among the next generation of technology leaders in Africa. The programme is now providing tuition costs and an annual stipend for the first cohort of five women and five men pursuing a BSc in data science and artificial intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) in Zanzibar, Tanzania.
Continuing our track record of constant currency growth
I would like to thank all our stakeholders for their support in 2024/25, which has been instrumental in Airtel Africa delivering another year of sustainable, profitable growth while playing a positive role in the communities and economies in which we operate.
Sunil Bharti Mittal
Chair