The 2008 ITU African conference took place in Cairo, Egypt earlier last moth from the 12th to the 14th. This networking event is an opportunities for manufacturers, regulatory agencies and African government to elaborate a vision of Africa's Information and Communications Technology future. Here are a few highlights I found interesting to note on the way Africa's ICT should move forward.
Here in the USA, politicians and activists are outrages by outsourcing and are doing everything they can to diminish it if not stop it completely. But let's face it, what CEO wouldn't want a customer service center that cost him less than $2/hr per head. I know I would. Well African countries want part of that money too. Even though India's dominance on the market is substantial and doesn't seem to go away anytime soon, many african countries have the advantage to have the same time zone as most countries in the western world. As India's workforce are getting more expensive African can take advantage of it and increase its market share. To do so , many prerequisites need to be fulfilled. There is a need of a more-skilled workforce. Cisco and Microsoft researches agree that about 1 million IT skilled worked are currently needed in Africa. Even though , I would argue that the African diaspora of Europe , the US and Canada can surely offset this deficiency. Another important fact companies would look at before outsourcing jobs in Africa is stability. Many countries are still recovering from War and others a re so unstable that any little spark can start a fire that will plunge them in chaos. So to see an increase in outsourcing jobs in Africa, we need more IT skilled workers, stable governments, incentives for companies ( like tax breaks) and fair regulatory agencies.
- The State of the Continent
Africa's mobile networks are more than ever expending. There are about 200 million mobile users in the continent with 66% of its area covered. In five years, 90% of Africa is projected to be covered by a wireless network. This grow can be attributed to the fact that most countries harbor a least 2 mobile companies to compete for customers. Fairer regulatory rules will get this number even higher. The next step would be to focused on providing data access to a majority of the population. The main problem hindering this is the monopoly of international gateway by government. The creation on many submarine projects aims to solve this problem by being more fair. Then the last step would be to focus on intra-country connections which are quasi inexistent. In this case, wireless broadband technologies such as Wimax and HSPA would be required to get the job done.
