The Great Smart African Market, located in Cleveland, Ohio, provides a diverse selection of products sourced from East Africa, particularly Lake Tanganyika. This market caters to those seeking authentic African flavors, offering everything from dried sardines like Dagaa Wa Kigoma to fresh Migebuka and Sangara. Culinary enthusiasts can find a treasure trove of fish varieties such as Mikeke, Nyamu Nyamu, and Kabuchungu, along with smoked options like Nguruka and Kambale. The convenience of accepting EBT online makes it easier for customers to explore and enjoy the rich gastronomic heritage of East Africa right in the heart of Cleveland.
Beyond local markets, a broader initiative is underway to transform the entire African continent into a digitally connected marketplace. The Smart Africa Alliance is at the forefront of this transformation.
The Smart Africa Alliance: A Pan-African Vision
The Smart Africa Alliance is a Pan-African institution with 30 Member States, representing a bold and innovative initiative from African Heads of State and Governments. Their commitment is to accelerate sustainable socioeconomic development on the continent by harmonizing policies, regulations, and ushering Africa into a knowledge economy. This is achieved through affordable access to Broadband and the usage of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
Smart Africa’s vision is to transform Africa into a single digital market through carefully selected interventions within the field of ICT and leverage the continental economies of scale, as Africa seeks to develop further. The key objectives include:
- Developing affordable digital infrastructure across the continent
- Promoting and facilitating framework conditions for doing business and investing across Africa
- Accelerating the birth and development of a truly digital society, including boosting the entrepreneurship ecosystem to promote economic growth and job creation
To translate this strategy into tangible actions, each Smart Africa member state selects a flagship of its choice and champions that particular flagship initiative. The objectives are to lead its implementation in their respective countries, for other countries to then adopt. This ensures that each country has a specific contribution to the overall goal and then benefits from others’ experience as well.
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In the case of broadband, a number of initiatives have been undertaken towards improving the state of broadband in Africa. The SMART Broadband 2025 Strategy, led by the Republic of Senegal, is an ambitious initiative to deliver increased affordability and access to broadband connectivity by 2025. This will unleash opportunities of emerging digital economy and position Africa as a player in the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Bringing Affordable Internet Access to the Sweetwaters Community in South Africa
SMART Broadband 2025 achieves this by enhancing broadband interconnectivity in Africa, breaking cross-border barriers, and being a foundational building block to realize a Single Digital Market (SDM) by 2030.
SMART Broadband 2025 is a call to action and the promise of:
- Affordable broadband service at 3Mbps minimum download speeds
- Increased access to content, at least 30% of which is generated and stored in Africa
- Devices partially manufactured in Africa
- Increased broadband penetration by 50% from the existing 39% in 2019 up to 51% by 2025, thereby adding 308 million people on broadband
SMART Broadband 2025 also promises to transition 12 additional countries to over 20% penetration; bringing the total number of countries that surpassed this threshold to 46 - a penetration level that provides a threshold of pervasive exploitation and realization of digital economy benefits.
SMART Broadband 2025 provides a holistic approach through seven thematic areas designated as pillars to deliver sustainable broadband. The pillars are:
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- Technology, infrastructure, and devices
- Demand-side capacity building, awareness, and affordability
- Content, application, and services
- Innovative economic models to mobilize investment
- Policy and regulatory frameworks
- Cybersecurity and trust
- Social inclusion - gender equality
In July 2019, a Working Group comprising Member States and the Private Sector underscored the complimentary role to realize broadband in Africa through a consultative process. Therefore, the SMART Broadband 2025 Strategy document will serve as a guideline for member states in increasing the penetration of broadband.
The creation of data centers in Africa represents one of the foundations for a single digital market and for the continent’s digital future. Content and services hosted locally are cheaper to download because they do not have to pass through costly international connections. The latency induced by the international routing of packages has negative effects on user experiences in Africa and threatens the deployment of key future technologies like IoT, cloud-based AI solutions, among others.
The security of sensitive data, as well as African states’ ability to monitor and regulate digital activities can be improved through the localization of data centers. The project is a flagship for the Republic of Djibouti and will be carried out through the creation of a working group made up of member states, partner organizations like the AfDB, and a cross section of the private sector in the field of datacenters.
Another critical project aims to connect each African country to the other, allowing for access and affordable internet either by Submarine, Terrestrial, or Satellite technology. An estimated 15,000 km of terrestrial fiber and 11,098 km of submarine fiber is required to achieve this target. This project is under the flagship of Guinea and in collaboration with Tata and other private sector members of the Smart Africa Alliance.
The initial phase, which is completed, involved the interconnection among three countries comprising of Mali, Guinea, and Senegal. Processes have been initiated for four (4) additional member countries interconnections which is scheduled to complete by the end of 2020. The second phase consists of ten (10) African countries and scheduled to complete by 2021. The remaining African countries, with priority on the Smart Africa members will be in the third and final phase, planned to be completed by 2025.
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Smart Africa has launched an initiative with the aim of making broadband affordable for the member states by working to secure an agreement with international broadband providers for long-term bulk sub-marine and/or Satellite bandwidth. The agreement will be based on the principle of more for less, as volume grows, the cost per MB of data volume should go down. Based on surety of aggregated projections of broadband volumes from all member states, this should give the providers an assured, steady level of income over a long period, hence the need to reduce costs.
At present and for the initial phase, Smart Africa has engaged a Consultant to conduct a study and analysis that will focus on the current 30 Smart Africa countries (Algeria, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Congo, DR Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome & Principe, Sierra Leone, Senegal, South Africa, South Sudan, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe), with best efforts for the remaining 24 countries.
The COVID-19 Impact and Digital Transformation
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportune time to accelerate the digital transformation of Africa ranging from health, education, finance, business, among others. This technology platform is highly customizable and adaptable to increase usability in various Member States, considering the language differences, the diversity of technologies, and devices used by the target beneficiaries. The secretariat also released a technical document that addressed issues ranging from broadband connectivity, financial support, data protection, food security, and education.
The recommendations, specifically for broadband, are shown below:
Recommended Immediate Actions:
- Declare telecom services as essential services.
- Reduce taxation on internet services and devices used to access them.
- Work closely with telecom service providers on zero-rating some essential online services for health, education, and work.
- Ensure data privacy and protection of citizen data.
Recommended Medium Term Actions:
- Invest a portion of the Universal Access Funds toward digital skills literacy and extending connectivity to the unconnected.
- Encourage network infrastructure sharing as a way to increase deployment of broadband to the unconnected.
- Encourage spectrum re-farming for quick deployment of services.
- Review spectrum licensing strategies for 4G.
- Initiate e-governance and e-service solutions
Recommended Long Term Actions:
- The Smart Africa Secretariat will launch the Smart Broadband Ambassadors, with a mandate to see to the implementation of the projects indicated in the strategy document.
- Countries come together to inter-connect the continent, through the initiative of the intra-African connectivity project, aimed at connecting every country by terrestrial or submarine cable.
- Countries encourage the roaming like at home scenario for citizens to reduce the cost of communication.
- Support the Smart Africa project for affordability on bulk purchase of wholesale capacity for all.
- Countries encourage the use of digital identity for good.
The Smart Africa Secretariat has embarked on a project on Smart Devices, which aims at making devices affordable and accessible. This entails Smart devices for broadband, Smart devices for Education and Smart devices for digital transformation.
The creation of Smart Africa is a testimony of our resolve to put in place the right policy and regulatory environment that will encourage partnerships, entrepreneurship, job creation and knowledge sharing. Our move towards an ICT and knowledge driven economy together intends to increase Africa’s competitiveness in the global economy.
Africa, considered to be the youngest continent in the world, has a great need for a catalyst platform in order to transform itself into a single digital market, for that to happen, we have to connect our countries and interconnect cross-borders, innovate our approach of social economic development, in order to transform and propel our continent towards a knowledge based economy in this 21st century, and these represent the challenges that Smart Africa will have to take on.
The Smart Africa initiative, coupled with local markets like the Great Smart African Market, are paving the way for a digitally connected and economically vibrant Africa.
