The man to whom many of them look for inspiration is Mo Ibrahim, a 69-year-old Sudanese entrepreneur who effectively brought the mobile phone to the continent. Mo founded Celtel in 1998, realizing that a continent of 1 billion people and almost no phones could be a highly promising market for telecom. When he started his company, the Democratic Republic of Congo had about 3,000 phones in a country of 55 million people. Today it has more than 20 million phones. Mobile telecoms spread in part because sub-Saharan Africa was a lightly regulated market. Anybody willing to invest would get the
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