Agritech, Climate Change & Senegal's 5G Licenses
Connecting Africa News
Get a comprehensive, informed and nuanced understanding of the region's tech, media and telecommunications landscape.
Welcome back to the?Connecting Africa?newsletter!
In this week's edition, we're exploring agritech's role in mitigating climate risk in Africa, SA Rain and MTN's expansions, and Senegal's newly allocated 5G licenses.
In recent decades, African countries have seen a rise in climate events which are negatively impacting agricultural output.
This has contributed to a 34% decline in the region's agricultural productivity since 1961 – higher than any other continent, according to Sisonke Mgwebi, consulting analyst at Frost and Sullivan.
According to the World Economic Forum, agriculture accounts for 35% of Africa's GDP and provides employment for half of its people.
South African telecoms company, Rain, is expanding into a "full mobile network operator" and will now be offering voice services on its network.
The company, which previously focused on the home Internet market and data-only services for mobile, is launching a new 4G mobile network with high-definition voice calls, data, SMS and national 4G mobile coverage.
"This has now positioned Rain to enter the market as a full mobile network operator, thus becoming the fourth telco after Vodacom, MTN and Telkom, with a network that offers national coverage in voice, SMS and data," Rain said in a statement.
A recent collaboration between tech giant IBM and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center aims to use artificial intelligence (AI) to answer some of the most pertinent questions regarding climate change and its impact on the Earth, including environmental challenges facing Africa.
"Some of the questions that can be answered include:
How is Africa facing growing heatwaves and drought fueled by climate change? How is the smoke impacting air quality? With Africa reliant on subsistence farming to combat malnutrition, what impact is extreme weather conditions having on crop yield?
By answering climate-related questions like these, we as a society and continent, are able to adapt to the changing environment around us," explained Kommy Weldemariam, distinguished engineer and chief architect for discovery science and applications at IBM Research.
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Senegal's telecommunications regulator (L'Autorite de Regulation des Telecommunications et des Postes, or ARTP) announced that it will allocate 5G licenses to telecom operators by the end of July.
ARTP Director General Abdou Karim Sall made the announcement to the media as part of the Authority's ten priorities for 2023 and said that a provisional date of May 31, 2023, has been set for the "launch of the call for competition" for 5G license extensions.
Sall told journalists that there will not be new 5G licenses in the country, rather there will be an extension of existing 4G licenses for operators who wish to switch to 5G.
Pan-African operator MTN has been making the news in different African countries for good and sometimes not-so-good reasons in recent times.
During MTN Group's 2022 integrated report last week, the telco announced that it would be launching its own 4G mobile network in Rwanda by the end of June.
That announcement comes after the Rwandan government said it wanted to?remove the exclusivity?held by Korea Telecom Rwanda Networks (KTRN) since 2013 in the 4G infrastructure market.
An Africa-based ad-tech free Wi-Fi service provider, ThinkWiFi, and an Internet service provider backed by Microsoft, Mawingu, have launched the first outdoor Telecom Infra Project (TIP) OpenWiFi network in Kenya.
The collaboration is funded using an advertising-based model, the first time a TIP OpenWiFi network has been built and commercialized using a sponsorship platform.
Safaricom has been granted the license to operate mobile money services in Ethiopia seven months after the?commercial launch?of its GSM network in the country.
Kenya-based Safaricom's M-Pesa was the world's first mobile money transfer system, launching in 2007, and has since grown into a broad mobile financial services offering.