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bidding included Ideal-Levantis, a large Greek trading company in Nigeria that had partnered with Vodafone's Greek subsidiary Panafone, and a relatively new pan-African mobile operator called MSI-Celtel. Six bidders pre-qualified and an inter-ministerial committee was appointed to evaluate the proposals. Few of the qualifying companies had ever operated a mobile phone network of any scale. Furthermore, many of the pre-qualified bidders were local companies that did not have the necessary funds to pay the new licence fee
). 69 ‘Orange and MTN launch pan-African mobile money interoperability to scale up mobile financial service’, MTN (22 November 2018), www.mtn.com/orange-and-mtn-launch-pan-african-mobile-money-interoperability/ (accessed 7 December 2021). 70 ‘Dare Okoudjou, CEO, MFS Africa in mobile money start-up MFS wants to have 400 million mobile wallets by 2020 – it's already nearly halfway there
International Development [USAID]), while others actually installed the modems and got things going (the Association for Progressive Communication [APC], Healthnet, NSRC, the Pan African Development Information System [PADIS]). 8 Almost all of the first internet connections to African countries were with bodies like universities, non-governmental organisation (NGO) networks and international organisations. 9 Development funders saw the
telecentres and refurbished computers … We were also looking at low-cost PCs like handheld devices and low-cost Indian computers … There was a Pan African network of champions. It captured the imagination of people across the continent. 104 The initiative was fighting on several fronts simultaneously. It ran a campaign to put one million computers in schools; was seeking to make internet connectivity
The alternative to a pay-for model is to emulate the Spotify model, which offers a free service with advertisements and a paid-for, premium, ad-free service. Kenyan music-streaming service Mdundo has six million active users across both categories. It has signed advertisement deals with global and pan-African brands including Safaricom, Standard Chartered, Nivea, Oxfam and Serengeti. 53 But, at the time of writing, digital platforms were generating relatively small amounts from online advertising revenues: ‘There
Others have sought multi-country presence through mergers: for example, Kenyan start-up MumsVillage merged with Baby Bliss in Nigeria in 2020: ‘I've always seen Mums Village as Pan-African … With Bliss Group, I had met one of the investors in it. I shared ideas with him and we found out we had a similar vision. It's hard to build one market at a time.’ 56 The difficulty is that many sub-Saharan African start-up founders are young and lack the experience of working across several