People in Africa don't use smartphones in the first place and I am not sure how they will deal with Bitcoin when there is no reliable Internet there as well. Even if the new service requires less bandwidth I don't think it will be as successful as simple SMS payments between people with no technical know-how of Bitcoin wallets and no advanced phones.
That my friend is arrogance and misinformation being spread by the media in first world countries. Did you know this?
M-Pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) is a mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and microfinancing service, launched in
2007 by Vodafone for Safaricom and Vodacom, the largest mobile network operators in Kenya and Tanzania.
This was 2 years before Bitcoin was launched. So they used a digital <currency> albeit through a centralized network on their old outdated phones, long before Bitcoin existed. Bitcoin still needs to adapt for it to be used on cheap phones, showing that these African countries are not that stupid as most of the 1st world countries might think.
I am a global contract worker, and I work in both 1st world and 3rd world countries and I can tell you that the only thing keeping these people from being as successful as 1st world countries are good leadership <politics> and money.