Issue no 605 18th May 2012
top story
-
Prices for wholesale bandwidth are dropping across the continent but particularly in the more competitive markets. These price drops will shake up how wholesale bandwidth is delivered and undermine some existing business models and no-one will be exempt from this process. The price falls are necessary to deliver the cheapest possible prices to households and individual consumers but current business models may need to be sacrificed to achieve this goal. Russell Southwood looks at how these changes will affect the business.
The logic of some changes is absolutely straightforward. If it costs more to send a meg of bandwidth from Lagos to London than it does to send the same meg from Lagos to Abuja, the latter will almost certainly come down in price. Nevertheless, although this logic was sound over three years ago when I started saying this, it’s taken that long to work its way through the system.
After a round of visits both more competitive and less competitive markets in West and East Africa, it’s clear that prices have fallen considerably in the international and national parts of the delivery chain and although metro/local access prices have to some extent been immune to these falls, new, independent metronet operators are offering competitive prices in some countries.
One East African operator told me that the problem was that they had both bought international fibre capacity and laid national backbone on the assumption of certain prices. Unfortunately, now the prices in the market were lower than their assumptions and there was a danger they would lose money unless the prices went up again. They complained that new entrants were unfairly undercutting their prices.
But here’s the thing…That operator was in a fabulous piece of real estate and its competitor was in a less palatial office off the beaten track. I don’t know the respective employee headcounts but I would bet money that the competitor was employing less people delivering its bandwidth. Whilst waiting in another operator’s offices, I lost count of the number of top-of-the-range Herman Miller office chairs and everything from this relatively trivial CAPEX element to larger ones has to be paid back to someone.
One of the operators I spoke to was talking about a 40% margin on the sale of bandwidth in order to make things stack up for its shareholders. Wholesale bandwidth has to perform financially alongside all the other product areas. Globally mobile operators are wont to complain about not wanting to end up as a “dumb pipe” but what if in future, the margin falls to between 10-20%? To sharpen the question, what if wholesale bandwidth delivery no longer makes sense as a separate business for mobile operators?
Let’s trace the logic of this position though and see where it goes. An operator with a large national fibre backbone probably has sufficient volume going through the network to make a return even with lower margins. The capital’s already sunk and you’re stuck with it. (Unless you take a radical view and write it down and sell it off.) Reasonable profitability on low margins may be assured if the operator is one of the new mobile incumbents with a 50-60% share of a country’s wholesale business.
However, those mobile operators with something less than a national network who are only getting a minority share of traffic from others will struggle to stay upright. Even the few carriers’ carriers on the continent will need a significant market share for things to make financial sense.
So what are the options? For those without sufficient volume to operate on lower margins, the choices are as follows: if you’re lucky enough to be in a place where you can, buy all your bandwidth from a carriers’ carrier; or form consortia with other operators to deliver wholesale capacity as cheaply as possible; or expect the Government to finance all or part of it as a public interest commitment to using broadband to modernize the economy.
Safaricom and Airtel have gone into a consortium in Kenya to share national fibre. The former took bids to build its own national network and once the numbers were in , decided against it. If you don’t’ already have a national fibre network, it’s not going to make much sense to build one now. From a similar logic, several of Tanzania’s mobile operators are in a consortium to deliver metronets and if the Government hadn’t decided to make TTCL’s national backbone arm a de facto monopoly provider, you sense they might also have gone the consortium route to deliver national backbone. (Airtel has outsourced the operation of its network to contractors but obviously remains in the driving seat for investment decisions like what network it needs.)
The Government-financed national backbone option has had mixed success. The Uganda national fibre backbone tops the disaster poll stakes. Money has gone in but it’s unclear who will manage it and what there is to manage. The Kenyan backbone apparently does not all knit together well but is at least operational. The World Bank has sponsored an operator consortium in Burundi but it’s early days. I remain open-minded but not blind to the risks.
So once you need to put your network into a consortium or buy it as service from others and you’ve sold off your towers to the tower leasing companies, what exactly is it that you do as a mobile operator? Well, of course, you manage the relationship with the customer, build the brand and develop new service propositions that will make money. But all this takes the new, non-vertically integrated mobile operator a skip and hop away from being effectively an MVNO which not unlike many ISPs, rides on the networks of others.
Voice income which was the financial backbone of the Masters of the Universe is not what it was in many of the Africa’s bigger markets. Data requires content and services. One operator told us of the relatively large amount that it’s now making from music sales. But a combination of social media and increased Internet use on phones will not make this kind of pay-for content a horse to bet the farm on. Alternative “over-the-top” operators like Spinlet have only to gain a little traction in some markets and the income drifts away. Why pay for news headlines and football scores when the Internet’s free?
So imagine a world if you will in which only a few vertically integrated mobile operators survive and the rest are much smaller MVNO or MVNO-style operations. The distinctions between active and passive infrastructure make less and less sense. Both MVNO and MVNO-style operations can and are making money around the world but their employee headcounts are considerably smaller than those of current operators. This is where I think the logic of the market will take us…but the last time I opened my mouth, it took over three years to happen.
• To follow the exchanges about this news, you need to be on Twitter. Follow us on @BalancingActAfr
New on Balancing Act’s You Tube Channel:
Bosun Tijani, Cocreation Hub in Lagos talks about innovation and social entrepreneurs
Jesse Oguns, blogger at oTeKbits talks about ICT innovation in Nigeria
From the previous week on Balancing Act’s You Tube channel:
Samantha Fleming, Afrosocialmedia on NGOs using social media
Dare Okoudjou, CEO, MFS Africa on selling mobile life insurance and the potential for mobile health insurance
Johan Nel, CEO, Umuntu Media on the launch of Mimiboard, an online pinboard for Africa
Roukaya Kasenally, Director of Comms, AMI on its new mobile news apps incubator
Ofer Ronen, Sales Director - East Africa, GilatSatcom on doing business in South Sudan
A special for Balancing Act readers:
Erik Hersman, founder of Kenya’s iHub in conversation with Russell Southwood, Balancing Act about the successes and failures of ICT4D:
telecoms
-
On May 15, 2012, Viettel announced the official launch of Movitel – the group’s first mobile network in Africa to join its already flourishing networks in Asia and Latin America.
In just over a year since being licensed on January 10, 2011, Viettel has built 12,600 kilometres of fiber optic cable and 1,800 mobile stations in Mozambique. This network represents 70% of the total Mozambique’s fiber optic cable network and 50% of the country’s mobile stations. The system has helped triple the density of Mozambique’s telecom infrastructure (increasing the length of fiber optic cable network and number of mobile stations per one million inhabitants in Mozambique by 2-3 times), making it one of the world’s fastest growing telecommunications networks and placing the country among the top three nations in Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of fiber optic cable systems.
With the country’s largest network right at the launch date, Viettel’s Movitel network is the first mobile network operator in Mozambique to have doubled the network coverage level committed in its proposal for the license. In addition to expanding the network, Viettel also recruits one to two local people to provide services door-to-door in their own localities.
At the launch ceremony, Viettel also officially announced its project of connecting and providing free internet for 4,200 schools as part of the group’s pledge to the Mozambican Government. At present, more than 500 schools have been connected thanks to this project.
“The Mozambican Government highly appreciates Viettel’s serious investment and commitment to social responsibility. This is the first time many areas will have had access to telecom services, so the company has made a major contribution to the implementation of Mozambique’s socio-economic development and poverty reduction strategy,” said Mozambican President Armano Emilio Guebuza.
Viettel has successfully developed and popularised telecom services in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Haiti, Mozambique and Peru.
“Mozambique is Viettel’s first market in Africa. Viettel is seeking for new opportunities to expand its investment in other African countries.” a Viettel representative stressed.
On entering new markets Viettel companies have consistently become the leading telecommunications player within just two years, contributing from 1-2% to a country’s national GDP; increasing national telecom network coverage by between 50% to 80% and jointly increasing telecom network density by 3 to 3.5 times more than the international average. Most local residents now have the opportunity to access telecom services, including 95% of people living in rural areas. Tens of thousands of jobs have been generated for rural people through the Viettel sales network. Free internet services are provided in all schools. These efforts have helped narrow the digital gap between rural and urban areas, and rich and poor.
-
The Pan-African telecoms service supplier, Gateway Communications, announced Wednesday that it had brought additional capacity from submarine cable SAT-3 to landlocked Botswana via South Africa, under its Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) initiative.
Customers can now access high speed, reliable connectivity, which will help to improve Botswana’s economic sectors, including mining, tourism and agriculture.
Gateway also revealed that more routes were being added to the networks already created in Zambia and Malawi during the initial phase of its terrestrial network initiative.
A new path, utilising both SAT-3 and SEACOM connectivities, has been developed to provide Zambia with a fully-redundant path through Zimbabwe.
“During the next few months, Gateway will be extending its terrestrial network by deploying another link into Malawi through the eastern border town of Mulanji. Under the next step of the project, Gateway aims to bring additional capacity to Mauritius by connecting the island via SAFE to a neutral data centre facility in South Africa and then onward to Europe via EASSy and SAT-3,” said the telecoms firm.
The link will connect Mauritius to Africa and allow the country to connect internationally using Gateway’s pan-African MPLS network and international peering stations in London, UK.
“Through this innovative project, we will make sure that the benefits of high speed services are available to everyone using our pan-African network,” commented Mike van den Bergh, CEO of Gateway Communications, adding: “This brings us closer to our goal of ensuring that every country in Africa has access to cost-effective and reliable capacity.”
-
Regulators in Nigeria have fined four mobile phone carriers a total of $7.3 million over poor service in a nation that depends on cellular phones for communications, a spokesman said.
The Nigeria Communications Commission's penalties hit Bharti Airtel Ltd. of India, Abu Dhabi-based Etisalat, local firm Globacom Ltd. and South Africa-based MTN Group Ltd., some of the dominant carriers in Africa's most populous nation. Etisalat and MTN must pay $2.25 million apiece, while Airtel faces a penalty of $1.68 million and Globacom faces a $1.125 million fine, said Reuben Muoka, a commission spokesman, on Sunday.
The fines come for poor service, dropped calls and bad line quality in March and April, Muoka said. The commission issued a statement Saturday saying that they decided to allow January and February to be a grace period for the companies to improve their services.
In October, the communications commission warned carriers it would begin fining them for poor service.
"The current penalties signal a new regime of quality of service management in the Nigerian telecommunications industry," the commission said.
The companies have until May 21 to pay the regulators or they will face further penalties.
MTN, long the dominant provider in Nigeria, has 41.1 million subscribers in the nation after 10 years of doing business there. MTN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Etisalat said in a statement it is committed to delivering quality service to more than 12 million subscribers in Nigeria, and expects to spend more than half a billion dollars on upgrading its network this year.
The CEO of Etisalat's Nigeria division, Steven Evans, blamed "the failure to hit some of the quality measures" in part on industrywide difficulties including a lack of reliable power, accidental damage to transmission lines and occasional sabotage.
"These factors are unique to the operating environment in Nigeria and pose a tough challenge for operators to deliver quality of service levels equal to that of other countries," Evans said. "What we would like to see is the declaration of the telecommunications industry as critical national infrastructure which would afford the industry and its facilities greater protection."
Emeka Oparah, a spokesman for Airtel in Nigeria, declined to comment. Officials with Globacom could not be reached Sunday.
-
The Swaziland Posts and Telecommunications Corporation (SPTC) has stopped selling its contentious fixed-wireless and mobile products. In March 2012 the SPTC reportedly made an offer to withdraw its ‘ONE’ mobile phone and fixed-wireless ‘Fixedfone’ services from the market, in a bid to end its bitter ongoing dispute with the country’s sole mobile operator, MTN Swaziland.
The offer was made on the eve of a hearing at the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva which sought to put an end to the feud. The paper reports that the SPTC has already connected around 50,000 fixed-wireless customers, 14,000 mobile customers and around 10,000 users of mobile internet dongles. The uptake is regarded as a significant achievement for the SPTC, which has claimed just 44,000 wireline subscriptions for every year since 2006.
Amon Dlamini the SPTC’s acting managing director told the newspaper that the company stopped the sale and promotion of these products about a month ago to smooth the ongoing negotiations with MTN. However, Dlamini has claimed that all existing subscribers will remain connected to its networks, a move which is sure to anger MTN.
-
Madamobil Holdings Mauritius Limited (“MHML”) announced on 15th May, that OMERT, the telecom regulatory agency of Madagascar, has issued a decision to revoke the license of Madamobil SA, its subsidiary in Madagascar. Madamobil is the 4th mobile operator in Madagascar and holds a 3G mobile operating license, awarded in 2008. Madamobil, which has been offering telecommunications services to tens of thousands of subscribers, has been faced with a sustained campaign by the Government to pay amounts that it does not owe. MHML considers that the decision of the Government’s past and current actions, taken at the behest of existing operators, are illegal and amount to an expropriation of its investment in the country.
In response to the decision taken by the Government, MHML and its shareholders shall be starting international arbitration proceedings against the Republic of Madagascar. Claims shall be filed under the rules of the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in Washington DC for in excess of 200 Million US Dollars in damages.
Since 2008, MHML and its shareholders invested over US$ 60 Million in the Madagascar project after securing the country’s 4th mobile telephony license. Phase I of the network was completed in 2009 within a record time of 6 months despite the turbulent events of that time.
After 2009, the new Government of Madagascar (through the then Prime Minister and the then Minister of Telecoms, who is now the head of OMERT) decided to block Madamobil’s interconnect to other operators after Madamobil’s refusal to accept demands for additional payments that are not specified under the Madamobil license nor in any of the prevailing laws and regulations. The impossibility for Madamobil’s subscribers to make calls to other networks limited its attractiveness for customers and severely impaired its operations and growth.Although the original business plan of Madamobil projected 1,200,000 subscribers in 2012, Madamobil captured far fewer subscribers due to the lack of interconnect. In addition, other direct or indirect restrictions and threats (such as the refusal to grant import licenses for technical equipment required to expand the network, the refusal to grant frequencies while at the same time granting them to the other operators, the withholding of expatriate visas to the technical staff of Madamobil, the prohibition on attending industry fairs etc.) have made it impossible for Madamobil to operate its business normally.
In its official communications, OMERT has indicated that the license of Madamobil has been revoked as a result of Madamobil’s failure to comply with tax obligations and further to complaints from other operators about Madamobil’s competitive tariffs and “unfair competition”.

Contrary to the statement made by the Government, Madamobil has fully complied with its obligations under published laws and regulations and was never notified by OMERT of any violation of its pricing or tax obligations before the decision was taken to revoke its license and expropriate its investment. MHML therefore believes that this decision is motivated solely by Madamobil’s refusal to make payments that are not specified under the Madamobil license or in any of the prevailing laws and regulations.MHML’s Chief Executive Officer, said: “MHML and its shareholders believe that the Government of Madagascar has severely infringed Madamobil’s rights as an operator and MHML’s rights as a foreign investor under the prevailing bilateral investment treaties. We would prefer not to stop service and not to commence international arbitration, but the Government of Madagascar leave us with no alternatives. We would be prepared to reconsider our decision only if the Government were to restore the license and its frequencies, implement interconnection and compensate for all of the losses incurred during 3 years of Government restrictions”
Madamobil’s principal shareholders are Private Equity firm, Life Telecom managed by Life Emerging Markets Capital in the Netherlands and Tecom Investments, a subsidiary of Dubai Holdings based in Dubai. The Company employs between 80 direct and 150 indirect Malagasy staff.
-
- Gambia’s Public Utility Regulatory Authority (PURA) has confirmed that it will block all unregistered mobile SIM cards which remain at the 15 June deadline which it has set for the country’s mandatory user registration scheme. Director general of PURA, Abdoulie Jobe, explained that unregistered users will at that date be unable to use voice services, although they will continue to be able to send and receive text messages, until an unspecified date when their account will be deactivated.
internet
-
An international group of research organisations are collaborating on a project to boost Internet access in rural Sub-Saharan Africa.
The project was discussed at a meeting of the board of the Global Research Alliance (GRA) - an international organisation that seeks to align the efforts of its members with the UN's Millennium Development Goals - in Sydney, Australia, this month (2-4 May) that looked at new strategies for improving access by the developing world to science and innovation.
Launched in 2003, the GRA comprises nine applied research agencies from around the world - including India, Malaysia and South Africa - that jointly employ around 60,000 researchers, scientists and engineers.
Bart Follink, GRA's chief operating officer, told SciDev.Net that this was the first board meeting since the organisation decided to establish an executive office in Melbourne, Australia, last year (June 2011), to coordinate collaborative work between members and partners, and "help the network to get to the next level of generating impact".
"The GRA has developed and matured over time. We are now able to put together big, complex projects [to address] problems in areas like food security, health, energy availability, clean water availability and Internet connectivity," said Follink.
The GRA favours "inclusive innovation", a model of development that seeks to create knowledge and to put in place inexpensive efforts to meet the needs of low-income populations.
Ramesh Mashelkar, GRA's president, said this approach "requires an alignment with organisations or countries that are in search of inclusive innovation. It has to meet a demand, you can't just simply supply what you have".
Under the auspices of GRA, several of its members are working on developing a communication infrastructure suitable for providing Internet access in rural Sub-Saharan Africa.
They are doing this in partnership with the organisation Macha Works, which has a project to connect a rural community in Zambia to the Internet, thereby creating new work and education opportunities.
"The rural areas of Africa are not well served [by the Internet] because the technology is built for urban environments," Gertjan van Stam, former chief executive officer of Macha Works, said.
"The Macha Works model is very much [one] of local empowerment and [works] to support what is locally needed," said van Stam.
"Macha is a living laboratory of [inclusive innovation] and it is showing GRA how to implement it. I think the GRA is recognising a partner that is not the best in technology, but is certainly a role player on how to deal with local communities."
-
Millions of Africans are one step closer to being connected to the global Internet following the May 11th launch of the 14,000km long West Africa Cable System (WACS) in Cape Town, South Africa. Consumers likely won’t see immediate benefits from the cable, but its operation is a landmark event in the chronicles of African connectivity.
“It’s as though we are no longer penned in,” said Wessel van der Vyver, Managing Director for international services at Telecom Namibia
It will be capable of carrying the equivalent traffic of Seacom, Eassy and SAT-3/WASC/SAFE cable systems combined. Wacs will meet the demand for capacity well into the first quarter of the 21st century.” – Neotel CTO and co-chairman of the Wacs management committee, Angus Hay
It’s unclear exactly if any ISPs are immediately utilizing the new capacity, but the launch is over three years (and US$650 million) in the making. Activation of the cable comes over a year since the cable first landed in South Africa. WACS is also the first direct submarine cable to link Europe, West Africa, and South Africa in over ten years. Political stability and economic planning have certainly come a long way since the SAT-3 cable last connected many West African nations, but what does WACS bring to Africa’s broadband environment?
Perhaps little in the next few months, but great things in the next couple of years:
500 Gb/s initial capacity upgradable to 5.12 Tb/s – the most of any undersea cable landing in Africa to date. Which is actually too much capacity for coastal areas with direct access. Infrastructure providers will hopefully rush to bring capacity inland, however.
In most of the nations served by the WACS cable, mobile broadband will become a reality. 4G and LTE will truly be possible. Still, as Vodacom CTO Andries Delport reminds us, “international connectivity is actually a pretty small part of the overall cost of delivering a megabyte of data via mobile.”
Nations like Namibia, Angola, DRC, Congo, and Togo will have direct international access for the first time. Soon these countries will be able to sell extra capacity to neighboring nations.Its Open access policy will boost international broadband competition which will benefit the consumer. For example, smaller operators in large markets like Nigeria can acquire direct capacity instead of securing it through larger operators.
South Africa’s government, as a pioneering partner on WACS through Broadband Infraco, can hopefully fulfill a 2020 vision of broadband for all.Reduced broadband delivery costs: TEAMs and EASSy have partially contributed to 50% lower costs in parts of East Africa.In the long term: lower prices will mean greater local content to address poverty and unemployment. Improved e-agriculture, e-commerce, e-learning, m-banking, and m-health will result indirectly from WACS.
Challenges remain around terrestrial connectivity, competition in respective markets, and wholesale pricing and consumer access.
Also, political roadblocks exist in at least the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although the DRC’s link to Monhoul Beach, the nation’s landing station for WACS, could be completed in less than two months it appears unlikely that the project will receive the go-ahead anytime soon.
WACS is operated by a consortium of 14 companies: Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable & Wireless, Congo Telecom, MTN, Office Congolais des Postes et Télécommunications, Portugal Telecom/Cabo Verde Telecom, Neotel, Telecom Namibia, Internet Solutions (IS), Telkom SA, Togo Telecom and Vodacom. The cable has landing stations in Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, the Canary Islands, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
-
Out of public view, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN agency, is working on proposal to give governments more control over the internet. The effort is supported by a number of countries including Russia, Brazil and China, and if it's successful it could mean the end of internet freedom.
After the WikiLeaks-affair and the Arab Spring, an increasing number of countries would like to 'democratise' the internet. China India, Brazil and South Africa all use the ITU as a platform to advance their plans, says Dieuwertje Kuijpers from the Telders Foundation, a research agency connected with the pro-market VVD party.
"It's a useful platform for them, enabling them to set rules about what is and is not allowed on the internet." That includes rules for both acceptable behaviour and internet regulation.
Russia and China were the first UN members to propose setting up the International Code of Conduct for Information Security. The code lists the rights and responsibilities of states when it comes to the web. The rules also make it possible to fight internet criminals and extremists attempting to undermine the 'economic and political stability of the state' - in other words, bring order to the chaos.
The first thing was to get rid of 'trivial' aspects like the right to anonymity and privacy on the web. The proposal was considered somewhat laughable in US and Europe but the controversial code of conduct is now getting a second chance.
India, Brazil and South Africa are calling for the creation of a new UN organisation to monitor and protect equal access to the internet. The UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies (CIRP) would consist of 50 member states, along with four advisors from the business world and society. Many people don't realise that this committee would mean the end of the so-called multi-stakeholder principle that everyone has a say in the internet. The 50 countries represented would decide how around 6 billion people are allowed to use the internet.
The United Nations is the last body that should be dealing with this issue, according to Dieuwertje Kuijpers: "The UN is too bureaucratic and opaque. That makes it almost creepy." It's also impossible to make this kind of agreement on the basis of consensus.
The ITU has proven its usefulness in the past. The agency facilitated the liberalisation of the internet in the late eighties, guaranteeing access for everyone without restrictive international frameworks. National governments are responsible for the rules of usage. Independent organisations such as ICANN ensure the technical standards and stability of the internet.
It's unclear exactly what the proponents of government control actually wish to accomplish. Clearly, cyber security, privacy and data storage concerns are part of their agenda, but so far the draft text has not been released to the public. Given the radical nature of the proposal, the public has a right to know more about the plan.
Arjan El Fassed thinks the Netherlands should refuse to continue negotiating until the ITU proposal is made public: "The majority of users will benefit from an open internet, not from more control. The problem with these proposals is that civil society has almost no say. The Netherlands should have the courage to stand up for those users, like other European countries."
The ratification of the controversial anti-piracy law ACTA has already demonstrated that politicians have little idea what these agreements entail. Specialists in the field of civil rights and internet freedom had to explain what ACTA means to computer illiterate MPs and civil servants. They cannot afford to be that ignorant this time around, says Kuijpers: "ACTA was a picnic compared to what the ITU is planning."
-
- Namibia - MTC has become the second operator in Africa to launch Fourth Generation (4G) LTE technology, promising much faster internet. "Customers will definitely have a much better experience in 4G as the speed will be tremendously faster and there will be no latency, when you click the button, you no longer have to wait to get a response from the network as this will now be instant, which is significant for business," said MTC managing director Miguel Geraldes.
computing
-
Modern states require sophisticated financial systems to manage complex state finances and ensure that revenues are collected and expenditure is well managed. Zimbabwe’s drive to rebuild its finances was thus dependent on the fitness of its Public Finance Management System for the task—and South Africa-based Barnstone played a big role in helping to ensure Zimbabwe had the tools it needed to achieve its goals.
Beginning in 2007, the country suffered a period of hyperinflation with calamitous results on a number of fronts. One of the casualties was the country’s SAP-based Public Finance Management System: the number of zeros simply became too many for the system to handle, and it was switched off. Government financial processes abruptly became manual and paper-based, opening the doors to inefficiency and corruption.
In 2009, Zimbabwe began its slow return to financial solvency with the introduction of several foreign currencies as legal tender, the centralisation of expenditure and payment authorisation systems, and opening a new set of foreign currency accounts for the Consolidated Revenue Fund and line ministries at the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe. The government adopted the US dollar as its currency of record and reporting.
With some measure of monetary stability returning to the system, the next step was obviously to reintroduce the Public Finance Management System. Zimbabwe’s Accountant General and the World Bank were concerned to establish that the Public Finance Management System indeed up to the task. They engaged Barnstone to assess the system.
Barnstone’s assessment showed that the system needed reconfiguration and strengthening in certain aspects.
“Getting the Public Finance Management System fit for purpose was clearly vital to support the Minister of Finance’s programme for returning the country to financial growth and to support integrated budget control,” says Barnstone’s Conrad Steyn.
The World Bank obtained funding for the project, and Barnstone was engaged to provide technical assistance to the Accountant General from March 2010.
Aside from configuring, testing and taking live the general and sub-ledgers for the Central Revenue Fund’s cash budget, and accounting in multiple currencies with reporting in a single reference currency, the project included several other elements. These included a review and, if necessary redevelopment, of financial policies and procedures to support the reconfigured Central Reserve Fund on the system, plus appropriate training. The goal was ensure the uploading of clean data for the 2009/2010 fiscal year.
Barnstone was also required to review the IT infrastructure and recommend appropriate improvements.
Barnstone put a multi-skilled team on the ground in Harare for the full 19 months of the project to work alongside the Account General’s team. At the end of the period, the joint teams had investigated and documented the existing structures on the system, including the chart of accounts, and mapped the chart of account to enable the extraction of financial reports. In addition, Barnstone developed standardized report sets for each ministry.
The system was set up to handle multi-currency accounts with the US dollar as functional currency. Barnstone further developed several key financial procedures, such as the collection and recording of tax revenue and the accounting of salary expenditure.
Under the guidance of the Accountant General, Barnstone also cleared the backlog of uncaptured transactions and performed virtually all outstanding reconciliations.
A key part of the work was training all relevant staff, including top-level financial managers, in the new systems and procedures, and providing SAP transaction user training guides for all the processes on the system. These guides are available on the central server.
Finally, Barnstone conducted an audit of infrastructure to determine the needs for funding requests. Funding was in fact obtained for the refurbishment of two call centres plus the purchase of a range of equipment. Looking to the long term, Barnstone also drafted a plan for infrastructure improvement.
“Zimbabwe has already made good progress on the road to financial recovery, and that journey will be greatly facilitated by the Ministry of Finance’s far-sighted programme to ensure the right technology is in place to provide the necessary support,” says Steyn. “Barnstone was proud to be able to help make such an important project successful.”
-
The Ministry of Education aims to have distributed 200,000 computers to primary school children across the country by the end of the year. The exercise is under the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Project.
According to Nkubito Bakuramutsa, the project's coordinator, as many as 105,000 XO laptops have already been distributed to various primary schools already.
"A consignment of 100,000 laptops, worth US$20 million, will be arriving this month and our target is to distribute 200,000 laptops by the end of December," Bakuramutsa said.
Over 145 schools have so far benefited from the project, he said.
"One Laptop per Child Programme is a major driver towards a knowledge-based economy," Bakuramutsa observed. He noted that the project's initial plan was to distribute the computers to at least five schools in each district.
This was, however, revised to at least one school in each sector as more parents now acknowledge the importance of their children using laptops. There are 416 sectors in the country.
The official explained that each beneficiary school would have a server installed with mathematics, science and English software to enable teachers to teach using laptops.
He said over 20,000 pupils in Primary Six across the country are capable of using various computer programmes, adding that schools with no access to electricity will be connected to solar energy.
"I call upon parents and teachers to support the OLPC project. I am optimistic that the beneficiaries will compete favourably on the labour market after completing their studies," Bakuramutsa noted.
Schools closer to the national grid are working with their respective districts and the Energy, Water and Sanitation Authority (EWSA) to have them connected to electricity, he added.
Bakuramutsa added that the project trains two teachers to support schools on troubleshooting hardware, software and XO applications.
OLPC Project has so far trained more than 1,500 teachers and heads of school, and the target is to train at least 1,200 more teachers.
Government-supported schools are provided the custom-made computers free of charge saying that there was another arrangement for private schools to buy them at a subsidised price of $200 (approx. Rwf120, 000).
The OLPC scheme was launched in Rwanda by President Paul Kagame in September 2008, with a target to have all pupils between P4 to P6 owning and using the green-and-white laptops.
money
-
The Algerian telco Djezzy, which is backed by the Russia-based telecoms group Vimpelcom, has reported a 7% rise in sales for the first three months of 2012 to DZD34.3 billion (USD457 million), which the operator attributed to an increased focus on higher-end subscribers.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) grew 8% year-on-year to reach DZD20.6 billion, while subscriber numbers were up 14% at 17.69 million
-
Without providing comparative figures for the year-ago period, Orascom Telecom Media and Technology (OTMT) reported net profit of EGP994.7 million (USD164.3 million) and revenues of EGP235 million for the first three months of 2012, reports Gulf Times.
As a result of the merger between Orascom and Russian telecoms group Vimpelcom, certain Orascom assets were spun off into a new company, OTMT. The figures are OTMT’s first standalone financial results since being hived off from its parent and listed earlier this year.
The revenues reported by OTMT include its part-ownership of Egyptian cellco Mobinil (in the process of being sold to France Telecom) and a 75% stake in CHEO, a cellular operator in North Korea.
Web and Mobile, Content and Services
-
With a fixed-line penetration of around 8% and mobile penetration close to 100%, Algeria has one of the highest teledensities in Africa, according to Research & Markets. Its relatively well developed infrastructure includes a national fibre backbone and one of Africa’s first FttH deployments. The country’s oil and gas reserves have made it one of the wealthiest nations in Africa.
Competition in the fixed-line sector received a setback in 2008 when the second operator, Lacom (a joint venture between Egypt’s Orascom Telecom and Telecom Egypt) exited the market after three years of operations, citing regulatory barriers that made it impossible to compete with Algerie Telecom. Only months later, the already delayed privatisation of Algerie Telecom was called off and the licensing of third generation mobile spectrum delayed further. The number of fixed lines in service fell by 16% the following year but has since then recovered. 3G licences are now expected in 2012.
To provide fixed connections, Algerie Telecom has made extensive use of CDMA wireless technology which supports broadband and full mobility. In parallel with the access networks, the national and international fibre optic backbone is being upgraded to an IP-based next-generation network. The government has announced investments of €100 million into national fibre infrastructure over the five years to 2014.
-
Nairobi, Kenya — The government has been urged to scale up use of E-health in provision of healthcare.
World Bank Lead Health Specialist Khama Rogo said with technological advancements, provision of healthcare no longer required direct contact between a doctor and patient.
He told Capital FM News that advancing E-health could also be used to bridge the gap of health workers and bring down the cost of healthcare.
"Technology has now made it possible for people to interact without seeing each other or being in the same room. The health sector offers some opportunities where that can happen and technology now makes it possible for us to get the best possible advice or even treatment for somebody who is not in the same room with you or information," Rogo noted.
In Kenya, the doctor to patient ratio is said to be one doctor for every 17,000 patients. This is way below the World Health Organisation recommended one doctor for every 1,000 patients.
"For Kenya and Africa, this is a particularly interesting challenge because often we have very few experts who are not all over the country. So E-health is a way of trying to bridge that distance so that even people who are not in the presence of a doctor or any other technically competent person can access and benefit from that information without necessarily having to travel the distance," he said.
"This is what E-health is about, bringing in the advantages of technology to make it possible for people to get what they want whether they are medical products or advice from somebody who is an expert but it not there with them," Rogo added.
He said that the infrastructure needed was the same as that being used to roll out electronic communication.
"For Kenya we are lucky that we are extending the cable system all over the country and that should be adequate to handle quite a bit of what needs to be done," he stated.
Rogo said E-health could be used for curative, preventive and promotive health care.
He also dispelled fears that this could be prone to numerous medical errors.
"There are diagnostics that are complex and there are those that are not and there are several ways of using E-health. You can use it directly to offer advice, you can use it to advice somebody who is in the same room with a patient. For example somebody in Garissa who probably is less qualified in a certain field and he has a patient there, we can talk, I could even see the patient on a video screen and advice on what to do," he explained.
He added: "There are errors even on face to face so it is not a question of the technology; it is a question of how you use it."
World Bank Health in Africa Initiative Policy Officer Jorge Coarasa said the national health strategy launched last year provided two avenues of E-health. These are using technology in various forms to improve what the health system already does and using technology to provide services that were previously not available.
"One way technology is improving and has a potential to improve access to affordable care is by taking it where previously it wasn't and you have already examples of mobile phones being used to remind people to take their drugs and this brings the medical profession closer to patients that otherwise it wouldn't reach," Coarasa said.
He said another advantage of using E-health was that it could empower the citizens.
"This can lead to what we call in technical terms horizontal inspectors. In other words, every citizen becomes an inspector and is empowered to hold health care providers accountable for the quality of care they deliver," he said.
-
Rwanda's Ministry of Disaster and Refugee Management (Midimar) last week launched an ambitious campaign of distributing internet-equipped cell phones to all sector leaders with the aim to enhance communication on disasters.
A total of 832 handsets, 32 smart phones and 32 laptops have already been purchased for distribution. "The cost of the entire project amounts to US$ 164,000," said Darla Rudakubana, the ministry's communications specialist.
She added that the program to distribute phones at sector level and smart phones at district level will help ensure fast reporting and response from the authorities. The move comes in the wake of massive floods that devastated three districts including Ruhango and Musanze leaving at least five people dead.
It was a major incident which got seven Ministers who constitute the government's Disaster Management Steering Committee led by Premier Damien Habumuremye to rush to the affected districts to inspect the level of damage. The Ministers who included James Kabarebe (Defense), Marcel Gatsinzi (Disaster Preparedness and Refugees affairs), Stanislas Kamanzi of Natural Resources, Agnes Binagwaho (Health), Musa Fazil Harerimana of Internal Security and Dr Alvera Mukabaramba (State Minister for Social Affairs) were presented reports indicating that 265 houses had been annihilated, 504 others damaged while 876 hectares of crops and plantations were destroyed.
The leaders were told that the flood had been caused after water from Karisimbi Mountain changed course and flooded the water channels causing an over-flow.
According to Midimar, with support from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Agency for Refugees (UNCHR) the Ministry is looking to develop a system where data are received via text messages or voice calls from designated individuals at all levels in the country. "This will later serve as an early-warning system that will give information on past disaster occurrences, impacts, high-risk zones and predictions on future occurrences," reads a press release.
In addition, the recipients of the equipment will also receive training in how to act, with the aid of the phones, in case of disasters.
Good communication and information are indeed vital when it comes to reacting to disasters, which seems to be increasing, especially those related to erratic weather. For instance, according to Midimar in the past two months, unpredictably heavy rains have claimed 17 people and caused fatal landslides, damaged roads and washed-away fields. Districts hit hardest are Musanze, Nyabihu, Rubavu, Rulindo, Ngororero, Muhanga, Nyamagabe and Karongi. Nyagatare, Bugesera and Kayonza have also not been spared.
Yet according to the national weather station based in Kigali, some of the areas that were devastated by the floods are actually known to be vulnerable and weather reports just before the destructive floods had predicted them, according to an official with the Metrological Centre, and had been broadcast through the media.
The new equipment, one might hope, will ensure better communication of such vital information.
-
Rwanda's Ministry of Disaster and Refugee Management (Midimar) last week launched an ambitious campaign of distributing internet-equipped cell phones to all sector leaders with the aim to enhance communication on disasters.
A total of 832 handsets, 32 smart phones and 32 laptops have already been purchased for distribution. "The cost of the entire project amounts to US$ 164,000," said Darla Rudakubana, the ministry's communications specialist.
She added that the program to distribute phones at sector level and smart phones at district level will help ensure fast reporting and response from the authorities. The move comes in the wake of massive floods that devastated three districts including Ruhango and Musanze leaving at least five people dead.
It was a major incident which got seven Ministers who constitute the government's Disaster Management Steering Committee led by Premier Damien Habumuremye to rush to the affected districts to inspect the level of damage. The Ministers who included James Kabarebe (Defense), Marcel Gatsinzi (Disaster Preparedness and Refugees affairs), Stanislas Kamanzi of Natural Resources, Agnes Binagwaho (Health), Musa Fazil Harerimana of Internal Security and Dr Alvera Mukabaramba (State Minister for Social Affairs) were presented reports indicating that 265 houses had been annihilated, 504 others damaged while 876 hectares of crops and plantations were destroyed.
The leaders were told that the flood had been caused after water from Karisimbi Mountain changed course and flooded the water channels causing an over-flow.
According to Midimar, with support from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Agency for Refugees (UNCHR) the Ministry is looking to develop a system where data are received via text messages or voice calls from designated individuals at all levels in the country. "This will later serve as an early-warning system that will give information on past disaster occurrences, impacts, high-risk zones and predictions on future occurrences," reads a press release.
In addition, the recipients of the equipment will also receive training in how to act, with the aid of the phones, in case of disasters.
Good communication and information are indeed vital when it comes to reacting to disasters, which seems to be increasing, especially those related to erratic weather. For instance, according to Midimar in the past two months, unpredictably heavy rains have claimed 17 people and caused fatal landslides, damaged roads and washed-away fields. Districts hit hardest are Musanze, Nyabihu, Rubavu, Rulindo, Ngororero, Muhanga, Nyamagabe and Karongi. Nyagatare, Bugesera and Kayonza have also not been spared.
Yet according to the national weather station based in Kigali, some of the areas that were devastated by the floods are actually known to be vulnerable and weather reports just before the destructive floods had predicted them, according to an official with the Metrological Centre, and had been broadcast through the media.
The new equipment, one might hope, will ensure better communication of such vital information.
Telecoms, Rates, Offers and Coverage
-
Prof John Nkoma, the director general for the Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA), says that the government has approved regulations to allow mobile number portability (MNP) in the country. Further, he notes that the TCRA has already put in place the necessary regulations to implement MNP and that a system will hopefully go live within the next twelve months.
More
-
AITEC Banking & Mobile Money West Africa
6 June 2012, Accra International Conference Centre
Now in its fifth year, the conference will cover a wide range of strategic and technology topics to empower West Africa's banking, microfinance and insurance professionals with the knowledge they need to lead their organisation effectively through the turbulent market and regulatory conditions they face. For the conference programme log on to the organiser's website here: To book exhibition space, email info@aitecafrica.com
Contracts -
The Director General of the Telecommunication Agency of Côte d'Ivoire (ATCI), Arthur Alloco, has been dismissed. The decision was taken by the Board at its meeting on "transitional measures for the implementation of new management of the telecom sector / Tic". A statement released by the board gave the following reason for the decision: "The serious failures in the performance of his duties," says the statement. Arthur Alloco held the position since April 19, 2011. He was replaced by Bile Diéméléou, telecommunications engineer, as acting General Manager.
