
The mobile financial services community is celebrating the tenth anniversary of mobile money. The first ever mobile financial service was launched in Zambia in 2002. It was launched by Celpay, and powered by Visa-owned Fundamo. The service was the first in a movement that has fundamentally transformed the way unbanked and under-banked people in developing nations use financial services.
Uproar over the potential liquidation of Nigeria’s state-owned telcos has ensued, following accusation of collusion.
India’s Bharti Airtel has bought the mobile masts of Rwandan carrier Rwandatel for $15.5m, after the African firm went into liquidation in 2011.
The opportunity for roaming in Africa is tied to the available audience which is limited by factors that include the available audience for such services based on national expenditures and the GDP PPP of would-be roamers and travel patterns in the region. On the positive-side Africa’s roamers are biased toward enterprise users who generally have higher expendable incomes and greater resistance to price fluctuations (price inelastic).

The Informer spent a few days in Barcelona this week, sniffing around the LTE World Summit. The default setting in the LTE sector is positive and forward- looking but a frank, challenging opening keynote from Orange Spain CTO Eduardo Duato at the event this week spat rather effectively in that soup.

If mobile government services in Africa are to be more sustainable than previous e-government initiatives, they must benefit all stakeholders. Today, the business model is uncertain. To put it bluntly, governments have limited budgets and the end users with most to gain from mobile government are often living in poverty in remote rural areas. As a result, telecom operators anticipate only modest, if any, return for providing low-cost connectivity and backhaul for these services.

According to the E-Government Survey published by the UN in 2010, although African countries generally lag behind other markets in the rankings of e-government implementation, there has been improvement in the region since the 2008 survey, particularly in northern Africa. Tunisia and Egypt were two of the highest-ranked countries in Africa alongside Mauritius, South Africa and Seychelles.
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Africa is my destination this week. I’m on a mission that’s both personal and professional.
Officially, I’m here to work with clients, catch up with our growing regional team and speak at Informa’s inaugural Cloud Africa Summit.
Unofficially, I hope to prove myself wrong about the déjà vu that I feel about aspects of Africa’s ICT market.
The IMF just said that sub-Saharan Africa is beginning to stand on its own feet, pointing to its sustained and major progress since the millennium.