The State of Sudan Digital 2019

For new graduates in Sudan, starting a business was as much a necessity as a choice, and digital was the cheapest way to start. The year before the report brought a wave of digital startups.

Experience had not kept up. Accelerators run by Haggar Group, the Embassy of the Netherlands and the British Council helped, but the report argued that angel investors willing to give time, more than money, would make the biggest difference.

Ride sharing was close to saturation after Careem arrived. The pricing model mattered more than the price when people chose a brand, and Tirhal had become a verb.

Zain and Sudatel entered ecommerce with 3amir and Soooqna, alongside M3roud and Platform. Only 8.6% of digital users had bought from an ecommerce company, yet 82% had bought something advertised on social media.

Android held 68% of the market, driven by the cost of keeping iOS devices running and the habit of using two SIM cards. The report compared Sudan in 2019 to the West between 2003 and 2007: a fast change in attitudes to digital, with room for new businesses and investment.

A digital survey of internet users in Sudan, a street survey of people who did not use digital channels, and interviews with business leaders. 78% of the digital survey respondents were men, which the report notes as over-sampling. The figures describe Sudan at the time of writing and have not been updated.

Sudan Digital published The State of Sudan Digital 2019 from Khartoum, a year after the first edition. It went further than the first report, into ride sharing, ecommerce, food delivery, banking and social media.

Sudan Digital started in 2017. When war reached Khartoum in 2023, our team was displaced. We rebuilt the agency from Aswan and renamed it Cush Digital, after the Kingdom of Cush. Its kings ruled the Nile valley from Meroë, where pyramids like the ones on the cover still stand.

This edition keeps the original words. We corrected spelling and grammar, redrew the charts and left out the advertisements that ran in the original. We did not update the data. Every figure describes Sudan at the time of writing.