ICT, an essential ingredient to Making Profit in Africa

with Nickey Mannya

Business in Africa has many shapes and sizes. From the entrepreneur in the streets selling some merchandise at the traffic lights, to the multi-national oil company in corporate Africa. The bottom line is the same across board, though some is to feed own children and siblings or build the community back home; and the other might be some hungry shareholders or investors, the goal is to generate some profit.

The lack of high-capacity broadband infrastructure in Africa's capital cities and between cities was under the spotlight at the Connect Africa Summit held recently in Rwanda. Emphasis on a Pan African ICT regulatory environment is a vital ingredient in speeding up broadband infrastructure network deployment across the African continent.

There are many ways that profit could be generated. The FIFA World Cup, sometimes called the Football World Cup or the Soccer World Cup, is an international football competition contested by the men's national football teams of the member nations of FIFA, the sport's global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the first tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946, due to World War II.

The tournament's final phase, often called the World Cup Finals, is the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world, with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the 2006 tournament final in Germany. The current format of the Finals involves thirty-two national teams competing at venues within the host nation (or nations) over a period of about a month. These bring about some huge economic benefits to the host country via infrastructure development, renewal of transport systems, tourism industry to name but a few profit generating benefits.

In the eighteen tournaments held, only seven nations have won the title. Brazil is the most successful World Cup team, having won the tournament five times. The current World Champions, Italy, follows with four titles, while Germany holds three. The other former champions are Uruguay (who won the inaugural tournament) and Argentina with two titles each, and England and France with one title each. In 2010, Africa via the winning host nation South Africa, will make history by hosting the 1st ever FIFA World Cup to be hosted on African soil.

What I find intriguing about the subject is that South Africa had proposed to host the tournament in 2006 but lost the bid to Germany. Controversy surrounding the decision was fuelled by the fact the 23 out of 24 executive members of FIFA voted with the voting results counting 12 for Germany and 11 for South Africa. The remaining executive who did not vote was believed to have favoured South Africa over Germany but did not vote the second time around so at to avoid a tie. This caused some serious dust kicking by the Confederation of African Football and most audibly the South African Football Association. A media frenzy criticising FIFA and its decision was then started.

Since then, FIFA adopted a rotation policy where the tournament would be rotated continent to continent to give economic ramifications of the tournament to its continental confederations. As expected, South Africa was the first beneficiary of the rotation policy and is set to stage the next edition of the World Cup in 2010. Next is Brazil, the only candidate bidding to stage the 2014 World Cup in South America. If South Africa set back and accepted the controversy surrounding the 2006 decision, the country could have even lost the 2010 chance. With a little squabbling, meetings here and there, FIFA’s minds were turned to introduce the historical rotation policy.

Now recently, FIFA's executive committee has voted unanimously to end its policy of rotating the hosting of World Cups through its six continental confederations. I for one do no mind the decision at all, at least the former afforded the emerging countries like South Africa and Brazil a chance to upgrade themselves to first world standards of infrastructure and chance to showcase what they are made of.

With commitment and focus, nations could change the minds of other nations, leaders could change other leader’s minds and people could change the minds of governments. South Africans in 1994 changed the apartheid government in South Africa into a national democratic government and had the first African president aka His Excellency Nelson Mandela elected.

To my surprise, the same pattern is not followed when coming to other issues across the continent. The DOHA round of talks, poverty eradication or the distribution of wealth as I would like to call it, MDG to mention but a few of failing economic and profit generating ideas that do not experience the same dust kicking attitude to see them through as experienced by FIFA. EASSy has been talked about for years, got its name changed to NBIN but still no progress. No so long ago a “Connect Africa Summit” was held in Kigali supported by the ITU to solve Africa’s ICT problems. Some $3 billion dollars was raised to kick start some projects to get Africa connected yet very little progress has been made to date.

The lack of high-capacity broadband infrastructure in Africa's capital cities and between cities was under the spotlight at the Connect Africa Summit held recently in Rwanda. Emphasis on a Pan African ICT regulatory environment is a vital ingredient in speeding up broadband infrastructure network deployment across the African continent. These statements were made by Sami Al-Basheer Al Morshid, director of the ITU Development Bureau, at the event.

The summit, organised by the ITU and hosted by the Rwandan government, addressed solutions for connecting all Africa's capital cities with broadband infrastructure by 2012, as well as interconnecting African capital cities through fibre optic infrastructure by 2015.

A recent assessment report released by the ITU reveals there is only 68 000km of terrestrial fibre optic backbone on the continent, with a critical deficit of infrastructure linking Africa's capital cities. This infrastructure only caters for about 1% of the continent.

There is a terrestrial fibre optic deficit of around 90 598 route kilometres in Africa at the moment, leaving 33 major cities unconnected to one another and unconnected to a submarine fibre optic cable, explains the report.

The biggest issue inhibiting fibre backbone roll-outs are government and regulatory policies within and between African capital cities. According to the World Bank, Huge financial investment by the private sector is available and is being held back in certain African countries by inhibiting regulatory policies.

Examples of investors willing to invest in broadband infrastructure with huge sums of money are the likes of MTN - Africa's largest mobile operator - which committed to investing $2 billion in a high carrying broadband fibre network in Nigeria, Celtel International with projects across the continent, Nokia, HP, Microsoft to name but a few.


To unleash investment by private investors, government and regulators need to work together to create a progressive Pan African regulatory environment, The World Bank added.

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