Uber has announced its expansion into four new cities in Kenya; Eldoret, Nakuru, Naivasha and Kisumu. This makes Uber available in eight cities across East Africa, which means more drivers have access to earning opportunities and more riders an affordable, convenient, and reliable travel solution throughout the region, at the tap of a button. 

Commitment to safety

As ridesharing becomes a way of life for more people, Uber never stops raising the bar on safety and is rolling out a new safety feature, Safety Check Up. 

Based on research, most riders seem to be unaware of the safety features available to them which contribute to a lack of confidence in the safety of the app. As a result, Uber is launching Safety Check-up in East Africa which will encourage riders to complete their safety profile by turning on and utilising the available features such as Trusted Contacts, PIN verification and RideCheck.

“We are committed to being a leading safety innovator, using new technology to improve safety standards for all our users. We continue to innovate to find new ways to promote safety, such as our GPS tracking and location sharing features, and our one-stop in-app safety centre with emergency assistance button, to name just a few,” says Imran Manji, Head of East Africa, Uber

New product innovations

Travelling across the city with an entire crew has never been easier, with the launch of UberXL in Nairobi, Kenya. This option provides seating for up to 6 people and extra luggage and is great for airport trips and even for groups who are making a business trip. 

Manji explains: “We are committed to East Africa, which is a key contributor to the growth of our business in Sub-Saharan Africa. At Uber, we’re passionate about helping people travel and discover their city with ease and helping drivers increase earning opportunities. 

EDITOR’s NOTE: Part of this story is from an official press release shared with the Tech Point Magazine team.

The Amazon * Safaricom partnership is not the first for an American Tech company to join hands with an African brand. Previously, Microsoft partnered with Liquid Telecom to offer cloud services to African start-ups

Unlike Microsoft’s extension of Azure services via Liquid Telecom which is focused on helping young tech companies grow with startups seen as the key cloud clients. The Safaricom AWS infrastructure is more dedicated to hosting businesses than leveraging the startup ecosystem.

According to the Acting Safaricom CEO, the telco chose Amazon Web services (AWS) because it offers customers the deepest and broadest cloud platform as he said:

We chose to partner with AWS because it offers customers the broadest and deepest cloud platform…This agreement will allow us to accelerate our efforts to enable digital transformation in Kenya

Michael Joseph – CEO Safaricom

What the New Safaricom * Amazon partnership means for East Africa

At the moment, Amazon is trying to extend its e-commerce portal to Africa since it doesn’t ship most of its items to the region. Excitingly, with the extension of its cloud platform through Safaricom, we could see the Amazon.africa domain coming to life as the case-is in other countries

With Microsoft Azure available through Liquid Telecom, developers will further enjoy the compettitive landascape that will be offered by both AWS and Azure. In return, cloud prices could meet new lows to accommodate the African economy structure

In East Africa, the Safaricom cloud platform will join local data centers offering cloud services and this means competitive prices from all providers.

In Uganda, Raxio launched as the First Tier III data center with cloud capabilities, once it goes live, its offerings will have to share the same competition landscape as Azure and AWS in East Africa.

Well, with Safaricom’s partnership with Amazon to offer cloud services in Kenya and East Africa is a straight head to head competition sniff with Microsoft that launched an Africa development center in Nairobi last year, and businesses will benefit more from the competition since the latter promises lower fees than AWS.

With the theme “Connection, Glory, future” , The Huawei 2019-2020 global competition aims at providing a platfom for IT students to showcase their talent and abilities in solving real world ICT problems.

In Uganda, the Huawei competition attracted a total of 2500 students across the country where 100 qualified for the National exams that sieved 3 Makerere students Magola Kenneth, Okello Stephen & Mudulo Gerald as the best for the next regional level

The local competition comprised of participants from Makerere, Kyambogo, Mbarara, Kabale,MUBS,Lira, Gulu, UCU and Muni Universities. All competing students had access to Huawei network simulators and an online learning platform

The learning curve was divided into network and cloud paths, The network lane included routing & switching, security and wireless LAN courses, while the Cloud lane had Artificial Intelligence, storage, big data and cloud computing courses

According to the Huawei Uganda Human Resource Director, Mr. Liaoshuangquan, the competition is relevant to ICT students and professionals because of its comprehensive approach to skills development for employment, enhanced productivity and growth.

“The Huawei ICT Competition and Academy is a comprehensive approach of skills development for employment, enhanced productivity and growth. Training contents in this program has been aligned with skills requirements in the job market. That is why we re-dedicate ourselves to working even more closely with universities across the country to better equip students with the next generation of technologies and create the platform for the Ugandan students to demonstrate they are capable of maturing into world-class experts,”

Liaoshuangquan – Huawei Uganda Human Resource Director

Additionally, the top 11 finalists from the top 100 comeptitiros will be awarded with professional certificates and job opportunities at Huawei Uganda.

Hence, as Makerere’s Magola Kenneth, Okello Stephen & Mudulo Gerald head to the next level of competing on a global scale in SouthAfrica, the rest of the 89 finalists will be able to apply for the 2020/21 round through active Huawei academies in Kampala, Gulu, Soroti and Kabale

Hon Minister Judith Nabakooba replaces Hon Frank Tumwebaze who handed over his office docket today at the Ministry headquarters along Parliamentary Avenue in Kampala. The latter joins the Ministry of Gender, Labor and social development as the former becomes the first female minister to lead an ICT driven Ministry.

On the other hand, Hon Peter Ogwang replaces Hon Aidah Nantaba as the new ICT state Minister. While handing over to Hon Nabakooba, Hon Frank Tumwebaze commended the roles played by the Ministry agencies__NITA-U and UCC in improving Internet connectivity in Uganda

This is after the Hon Tumwebaze officiated the National backbone Infrastructure project extension to remote areas like Koboko, Katakwi among others in a bid to avail Internet services to these regions.

Additionally, the Minister’s contributions to the ICT Innovation ecosystem have left initiatives like the National ICT Initiatives Support Program (NIISP) that aims at creating a vast marketplace for local Innovative digital products to help Innovators market their creations.

The Incoming Minister Hon Judith Nabakooba promised to maintain the trend and further inked her plans for the Ministry with core focus on fighting any corruption incidences under her leadership.

We are going to analyse how much Uganda has been connected to the internet. I will also not entertain corruption,

Hon Judith Nabakooba

The Handover Ceremony at the Ministry headquarters was attended by the wing’s Permanent Secretary – Hon. Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, The UCC, NITA-U and Uganda Media Center Executive Directors – Eng. Godfrey Mutabazi, Mr. James Saaka, Mr. Ofwono Opondo respectively

Well, Jumia Rwanda now joins Tanzania in waving a Goodbye flag to all online shoppers in the region. According to New Times Rwanda through Tech Weez, Jumia sent out a message to its customers and here is a snippet of how ut read

We regret to inform you that Jumia will suspend our on-demand delivery operations in Rwanda on January 9th 2020

Jumia Rwanda

Even though Jumia stated a mere suspension as its reason to wave a red flag in January next year, the state of Jumia group after its official listing onthe new york stock exhcnage is sidelined with low profitability against the brand’s plans

It’s due to the low profitability ratios that the group is aslwoly closing in countries where it feels bullish spikes have not been attracted to its overall operations

Suprisingly, Jumia group has also went on to shutdown Jumia Travel in Nigeria with a quick takeover by a company dubber “Travel Start” as reported by TechHawk

Luckily, affected employees acoording to Tech Weez will get job placments in TravelStart and their severance packages from Jumia travel fully paid to them as a vote of thanks for their services

As a clarification on the ongoing closure of Jumia in Rwanda and Nigeria, the former’s Managing director inked that the group’s struggle with profitability in different markets is the true reason behind the suspension of its services in major countries.

Though MTN Uganda experimented 5G with self-driving cars at the expo and Internet of Things (IOT) booths for the show. MTN Nigeria has changed its odds and graced citizens with a taste of 5G network speeds that tremble 1000 times faster than regular 4G on-peak speeds

The demo has been conducted in Abuja and follows MTN Nigeria’s promise made in July to bring 5G connectivity to the Igwe country proceeding a South African test where the standard reached 20GBs per second with a latency mark of less than 5minutes

In fact, the Nigeria communications commission (NCC) had already announced plans to deploy 5G and the Yello telco just placed its bid ahead before the NCC plan is fully implemented according to Tech next Nigeria

According to the CEO of MTN Nigeria, their plan is to make 5G widely available in the region once the right infrastructure is acquired from giant wings like Huawei as he commented on the demo launch

5G will make our life better, drive incremental capacity and open up new businesses. MTN as a company is constantly making efforts to break barriers by democratising voice and data connectivity in order to improve subscriber experience, and has invested over N800 billion in infrastructure in Nigeria

Ferdi Moolman, CEO of MTN Nigeria

In a flip, 5G networks are slowly paving their path to Africa step by step, first was SouthAfrica’s assertion that Huawei was the key 5G driver and now Nigeria’s 5G demo launch spicing up MTN Uganda’s 2018 teaser during its expo

So, expect 5G to replace 4G network connectivity very soon since the time machine has started beaming the future much faster than we all expected.

This Award recognizes the two companies for offering the new revolutionary Mobile Money Overdraft service, known as “Fuliza”. This service enables users with insufficient funds in their M-PESA accounts to borrow money to complete their M-PESA transactions.

The service was officially launched in January 2019 and has been gaining popularity in Kenya where Safaricom has over 23.6 million M-PESA users. Kenyans transacted over KES 6.2 Billion (USD 62M) in Fuliza’s first month after its launch.

Michael Joseph, CEO, Safaricom said “M-PESA continues to play a leading role in deepening financial inclusion in the country. Fuliza enriches our mobile financial services portfolio further fulfilling our promise to always provide our customers with relevant products and services that meet them at their point of need. We are glad to partner with Huawei in bringing this commitment to life.”

Fuliza is empowered by the Huawei Mobile Money Finance Overdraft Platform which allows design, development, and deployment of innovate finance products. This platform was created to enable credit overdraft facilities in multiple payment scenarios in a highly secure and stable way.

Over the years, Huawei has been working with Safaricom in improving its mobile financial services and developing new products, especially for loans and savings which can bring many benefits to individuals but also to SMEs to help grow their businesses.

David Chen, Director of Marketing & Solution Sales for Huawei Southern Africa Region said: “Financial services requires security and stability. These two elements are in the DNA of all Huawei’s ICT solutions. We have focused on building a world-class application programming interface (API) to enable the local ICT ecosystem to tap into M-PESA to serve the needs of our client for business success and nurture the digital economy from a macro perspective.”

AfricaCom is Africa’s biggest telecoms and technology event which takes place annually in Cape Town, South Africa. This year, during this 3-day event Huawei has showcased its end-to-end 5G ability, facilitating the industry’s digital transformation through innovative tools, platforms and solutions and explored new opportunities that are emerging for the industry from these new technologies

Well, according to Mr. David Chen, the Vice-President of Huawei in the Southern Africa region, telecom operators in Sub-Saharan Africa should invest in 4G/LTE networks as the first step towards a 5G future.

“Currently, the mobile broadband penetration rate in Africa is only 47%, while 4G penetration rate is merely 10%,” Chen said.

“Insufficient coverage causes LTE users to fall back to the 2G or 3G networks, resulting in a significant decline in user experience. It also leads to congestion on the 2G and 3G networks and makes it difficult to release the spectrum used by 2G and 3G.”

Chen said that LTE and 5G complement each other and are evolving in parallel. In the next few years, 5G will mainly be used in more industrial communications.

LTE will remain the primary choice for global mobile communications through 2025. It will form the basic layer of national networks, especially when it comes to mobile broadband access.

“It will take a long time for 5G to provide nationwide continuous coverage. Before that, enhanced LTE networks can guarantee optimal user experience for 5G users, including services such as VR, AR, and cloud gaming,” said Chen.

He said that it is important for operators to invest in 4G to secure future growth, as it is estimated that there will be an additional 80 million LTE users in sub-Saharan Africa by 2025.

Driven by this growth, LTE traffic in sub-Saharan Africa will increase by a factor of 8.8. By 2025, about 80% of all data traffic in the region will be over an LTE network.

LTE will also be the main source of future revenue for operators.

“According to GSMA Intelligence, 2G and 3G users in sub-Saharan Africa will gradually migrate to 4G,” said Chen. “By 2025, the proportion of 2G users will drop from 46% to 12%.”

Part of the reason for the migration to 4G is because the ecosystem is mature.

“The price of feature phones supporting VoLTE in the sub-Saharan Africa market has been as low as $25,” Chen said.

Since 5G equipment is already available, there is an opportunity for operators to build out their 4G networks while ensuring that they can evolve to 5G in future.

Chen offered the following tips to operators to ensure they are ready for 5G:

* All future equipment installations should be 5G ready, allowing easy upgrades to 5G through software updates.

* Software should support multi-standard spectrum sharing to improve spectrum efficiency, and to allow the smooth migration of 2G and 3G users.

* Networks must support 4G and 5G coordination, in terms of spectrum, operation and maintenance. This will ensure that users have a consistent experience as we enter the 5G era.

* The value of existing ICT infrastructure, such as base station sites, must be maximised to avoid overlapping services and wasted resources. This would mean boosting the capacity and coverage of every station for optimum efficiency.

* Carriers should explore the business case for all possible 5G innovations when building 4G networks, and not just embrace 5G for its own sake. This will mean building business models around IoT, video, live broadcast, augmented reality, and virtual reality.

* It is important that operators build partnerships with providers that can support the ongoing spectrum evolution with fast site upgrades and large-capacity solutions. The idea is to maximise the value of 4G networks, and smoothly evolve to 5G without unnecessary infrastructure investment.

Once completed Raxio Uganda’s tier III facility will become the cornerstone of digitisation in the country, allowing customers to seamlessly cross-connect within the data center providing a consistent and reliable experience for local SEACOM’s customers.

As the global carrier partner, SEACOM will drive the Internet in Uganda closer to businesses, offering affordable, reliable and quality Internet connectivity – highlighting the mutual benefit of the partnership. 

Raxio Uganda was established by First Brick Holdings Inc, as the first of its network of state-of-the-art data centers across the region. As an open-access data centre, Raxio Uganda will offer a wide variety of connectivity options, providing diversity and flexibility for SEACOM’s customers.

The new data center, which is currently under construction and is set to be completed in Q1 2020, will operate according to Tier III standards facility. At full capacity, Raxio Uganda will be able to accommodate up to 400 racks and deliver 1.5MW of power, in a fully redundant, high-security environment.

Tonny Tugee, MD of East Africa SEACOM explains, “This partnership with Raxio Uganda will be key as we drive to expand our business in this important market. Raxio Uganda’s new enterprise-grade facilities will ensure the delivery of a full range of services, in a stable, ‘always-on’ environment, to our customers in Uganda. We’re also excited about the potential to extend our relationship outside of Uganda, further augmenting the geographic reach and network infrastructure we can offer our customers.”

Robert Mullins, Executive Director at First Brick Holdings, Raxio Uganda’s parent company, adds, “Bringing SEACOM onboard is a testament to the growing recognition of Raxio Uganda as the go-to partner for cross-connects, delivering robust enterprise-grade, open access data infrastructure, optimised and deployed to meet our customers’ needs. We are also delighted with the opportunity to explore new opportunities to work together in the broader region”.

Both SEACOM and Raxio Data Centre will be attending AfricaCom – the leading African telecommunications, media and technology conference – in Cape Town on 12-14 November 2019.

Raxio Data Centre will be exhibiting at this year’s conference from stand #DC24, showcasing its state-of-the-art data centre facilities and colocation services, as well as discussing key trends for data centre and communications infrastructure investment in Africa.

MTN, Airtel, Glo, and Vodafone are the dominant service providers in Ghana and the news making rounds on Social Media, sound with bits of the country’s Communications Minister’s new order to end the data and voice bundles expiry streak.

Hon. URSULA OWUSU-EKUFUL__The Minister of Communications stretched her order as an insight to end the telecoms’-to-subscriber direct tax and not just a reflection of the percentage paid to the tax authority.

Network operators have not been passing on the communication service tax (CST) to subscribers, but instead take advantage of the 3% increase to pass on the entire tax to subscribers. This has effectively increased their profit margins at the expense of subscribers

Part of the official letter to network operators read

As a popular norm in many countries, the tax authorities like URA in Uganda only charge Network operators and not direct subscribers. But according to the letter by Hon Ursula, telcos had resorted to shifting their tax burdens to subscribers, something that has provoked new twists.

To minize the negative impact of the current mode of deduction of the CST, the Ministry of communications hereby directs the immediate implementetation of the follow measures

The letter further read

Though Subscribers across Africa have addressed the new policy by Ghana as a learning point to their service providers like those in Uganda.

The fate of such a policy lies in the hands of tax authorities that have the might to determine subscriber rates and bundle timeframes. Nonetheless, here is a sniff of the full letter issued to telcos in Ghana.

Telcos directed to stop cha… by myjoyonline.com on Scribd