The short answer: a split sector
Ask who owns Africa's banks and the answer is emphatic — mostly Africans. Ask who owns its telecoms and the picture splits down the middle. Of the eleven operators on the Ownership 100, six are African-owned and five are controlled from abroad — and the split is not random. The foreign majors took the crown jewels: the biggest, most cross-border, most profitable networks. African founders and states kept the national champions. Telecoms is the hinge of the whole ledger — the sector where retention and export sit side by side.
The exception that towers over the sector: MTN
The most important fact in African telecoms is that its largest operator stayed African. MTN ended June 2026 with about 317.7 million subscribers across 19 markets 1, the biggest mobile network on the continent — and it is JSE-listed, widely held and controlled by no single foreign owner (see Who Owns MTN?). A pan-African giant of that scale remaining African-owned is the exception that makes the rest of the sector legible: it proves the crown jewels could have stayed home. Most didn't.
The crown jewels the majors took
Because the biggest single-country prizes went abroad. Safaricom — Kenya's crown jewel and M-Pesa's parent — is controlled by Vodacom, and above it Vodafone in London 2; Vodacom itself is majority-owned by Vodafone 2; and Airtel Africa, across 14 markets, is controlled by India's Bharti Airtel, which raised its stake to about 79% in 2026 3 (see Who Owns Airtel Africa?). These are not marginal networks — they are among the most valuable operators in their markets, and their equity, and their upside, route to London and Delhi.
Francophone and North Africa: Orange and Etisalat
The pattern extends across the language lines. In Morocco, Maroc Telecom — a telecoms force across North and West Africa — is controlled by the UAE's Etisalat (e&), which holds about 53% 4 (see Who Owns Maroc Telecom?). In Senegal, Orange took majority control of Sonatel, lifting its stake to about 52% after buying shares from the government 5, which stayed the second-largest holder. Much of Francophone and North Africa's incumbent connectivity answers to Paris and Abu Dhabi.
Who stayed home
And yet a real African-owned bloc held. Glo is owned outright by the Nigerian billionaire Mike Adenuga (see Who Owns Glo?); Telkom in South Africa is state-and-public held; Ethio Telecom is Ethiopian-state-owned with only a minority floated; Angola's Unitel sits with Angolan state and domestic interests; and Econet, the pan-African telecoms-and-digital group, was built and is controlled by Zimbabwe's Strive Masiyiwa. These are national champions, founder empires and state assets — the operators a government could not, or would not, let cross a border.
Why telecoms split when banks didn't
The contrast with banking is the tell. Both are regulated, licence-gated industries — which is why neither is as exported as consumer brands. But telecoms had something banking mostly didn't: a wave of global operators (Vodafone, Bharti, Orange, Etisalat) with the capital and the appetite to consolidate the continent's networks in the 2000s and 2010s, at a moment when African capital markets couldn't match them for a cross-border build. Where a bank's licence tied it to one country's regulator and its local shareholders, a mobile operator was a pan-African prize a global major could roll up. The result is the split: the networks that stayed single-country or founder-held stayed African; the ones valuable enough to consolidate across borders mostly did not.
That is the value-capture reading the Ownership 100 keeps surfacing, one sector at a time. Banking retained; consumer and culture exported; telecoms splits the difference — with MTN as the standing proof that the crown jewels didn't have to leave. Read the full ledger, the banks, and the individual answers on Safaricom, Vodacom and Airtel Africa.