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the launch of Telecel in Zaire, the country had only a monopoly fixed-line incumbent telephone company. There were only twenty-four thousand phone lines for a country of thirty million people. Calls often failed to go through, and when they did the quality was very bad. Most of the company's infrastructure had not been updated since the 1960s and people often stole and sold parts of the copper network. The brains behind the idea for the new mobile network was Miko Rwayitare, a Rwandan who had completed his education in Zaire. He teamed up with
subscribers. The starting point for most sub-Saharan Africans using internet content is very everyday. A male Rwandan focus group participant in 2017 recalled that it was his interest in the European Champions League as well as in communicating with friends. 69 But once they started, it became ‘a veritable tool for news, social interactions, education, business, online shopping, funds transfer, career building, among others’. 70 A female Ugandan research
radar, ex-Africa One cable promoter Brian Herlihy had been working on Seacom, and in 2007 he went public: ‘NEPAD worked very hard to block it. They said no country in the world will have more than one cable. I was saying: “why stop any of them?”’ 110 Herlihy fought back by convincing President Kagame of Rwanda, who was chairing NEPAD, that the South African position was wrong: ‘We couldn't agree on everything but they said we accept your open access story. Kagame supported the idea of open access and multiple cables
–50: From July 2008 to end 2009 we started to offer ‘baby’ browsing experiences. We'd offer things that you can look at in a browsing kind of way. It was not like making a request using SMS. Facebook started to offer SMS versions of Facebook. Lots of people were getting access for the first time. 6 By the time Tigo launched in Rwanda in 2010, the country had three international cable options and
countries – Madagascar, Rwanda and Tanzania – had any level of national interoperability. 66 Two broad levels of this emerged: workarounds involving things like customer SMS vouchers and full account-to-account (A2A) transactions: ‘A2A is inherently more convenient for end-users because it opens access to customers outside mobile money providers’ networks.’ 67 One of the mobile operators’ fears was that, in
close to the president of Benin, hundreds of thousands of dollars for ‘consulting’ services. However, these were neither properly documented nor shown to have been performed, but were a cover for bribes being paid to officials in Benin. In 2000, telecoms equipment vendor Alcatel signed an agreement with contract facilitation company Telliac to get contracts for its products in several sub-Saharan African countries including: Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Uganda. Under the contract, Alcatel paid €5 million to
. In some countries, former colonial languages such as English and French are spoken by only very small percentages of the population. In Rwanda, only 5% of the population speak either language. Many African languages are primarily oral, so simply substituting them for an official written language is not always a realistic option for increasing access. Further, not all languages are equal when it comes to machine translation: Analysis shows there is a clear income gap in access. Google Translate is
expanding into certain parts of sub-Saharan Africa; thus, in 2000, Vodafone bought 40% of Safaricom in Kenya (see Chapter 7 ). MTN began its African expansion modestly by starting operations in Uganda, Rwanda and Swaziland (all in 1998) before moving on to Cameroon and Nigeria (both in 2000). There followed a range of acquisitions, including Telecel Zambia in 2005 and the much larger purchase of Lebanese company Investcom Holdings’ West African operations in 2006. Another large multinational with an interest in the continent was France Telecom and its
9. Central African Republic France 32. Rwanda Germany then Belgium post WWI 10. Chad France 33. São Tomé