التكنولوجيا وأخبارها بوابة مصر لأخبار تكنولوجيا المعلومات والإتصالات
Africa in Motion Accelerating Africa’s digital future
By Fadi Pharaon, President of Ericsson Middle East and Africa
As a continent with very high potential for growing
economies, how can African countries accelerate their
digital adoption and leapfrog into a new era of socio-
economic prosperity?
This could be achieved by leveraging new technologies that
make it easier to conduct business, raise productivity and
efficiency while encouraging an inclusive society.
Embracing new ways of enabling positive change will boost
livelihoods, promote financial inclusion and improve access
to health, education, government services and more.
With the ambition of supporting the acceleration of Africa’s
digitization journey, we are working jointly with our
customers – the service providers – and other stakeholders
across the continent to enable #AfricaInMotion.
Digitization Boosting Economies
We believe that Information and Communications
Technology (ICT) is the catalyst for digital transformation,
with mobile networks being the crucial ingredient in
increasing Africa’s economic competitiveness in the global
arena. While we have witnessed impressive market
developments in recent years, Africa’s ICT sector still has
growth potential compared to leading economies.
As digital infrastructure and transaction become
increasingly impactful to the development of the African
societies and economies, affordable broadband access will
need to be extended to over a billion individuals to bridge
the “digital divide” and enable them to reap the benefits of
the digital economy.
The Ericsson Mobility Report shows us that, by 2025, 77%
of subscriptions in the Middle East and North Africa are
expected to be for mobile broadband, while in Sub-Saharan
Africa mobile broadband subscriptions will increase to
reach around 72% of mobile subscriptions. Mobile
broadband connectivity not only offers great potential to
transform cities and industries, but it enables connectivity
as a basic human right; fostering inclusion and making a
positive, sustainable economic impact. With our
commitment to innovation and long history of engaging in
Africa’s telecom industry, we at Ericsson are driven to
deliver the next-generation technology solutions to Africa.
These can enable sweeping changes to industrial
production, allow seamless access to societal services and
provide people with ways of living harmoniously with their
environment.
Sustainability Through Connectivity
Bridging the “digital divide” is a demanding journey both
for the public sector and the telecoms industry. This carries
significant potential to contribute to the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Africa. In order
to achieve that, we have a continuous ongoing journey
serving several parameters.
And the story just begins here. We strongly believe in the
importance of education for the economic development of
Africa by building the right foundation to propel a steady
eco-system. Our efforts to support education in Africa is a
continuous determination and for that we are proud to
launch our three-year global partnership with UNICEF that
will help map school connectivity in 35 countries by the end
of 2023. Our partnership will support the UN’s Giga
initiative, a global program led by UNICEF and the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) that aims to
connect every school to the Internet.
Another key example in supporting education is our
“Connect to Learn” program, an initiative that implements
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in
schools often in resource poor settings to enhance the
quality and access to teaching and learning resources in a
safe, cost effective, and user-friendly way. The program
uses the power of mobility, broadband and cloud
solutions. Since 2008, we have helped to connect over
500,000 people, students and teachers at remote villages
across 10 sub-Saharan countries with technology tools,
digital learning resources and new interactive forms of
teaching pedagogies.
Furthermore, another testimony that reiterates our efforts
in supporting education, is our recently announced
“Ericsson Educate” initiative with UNESCO. In response to
how the global COVID-19 Pandemic, UNESCO and Ericsson
have launched a new portal for teaching Artificial
Intelligence (AI) to children. Teaching AI is a learning
program, which includes a free, multi-lingual artificial
intelligence (AI) skills portal that can be accessed globally
by parents and teachers, enabling them to support children
and students in home learning environments to learn about AI.
Additionally, we have also launched recently our Digital Lab
program in South Africa. The program represents Ericsson’s
commitment to supporting the UN Sustainable
Development Goals – especially Goal #4, with the aim of
ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and
promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. The
Ericsson Digital Lab program is an innovative education
program targeted towards older children to support them in
their first encounters with the world of programming and
new technologies. The program started in Gothenburg,
Sweden, as a collaboration with Universeum, a public
science centre based in Gothenburg. During 2019-20 the
program was expanded to South Africa. We partnered with
“Wot-If? Trust” to bring this innovative digital skills
program to the youth in Diepsloot, Johannesburg, South
Africa and our ambition is to expand this initiative to more
young students across Africa.
On the other hand, we also focus on another fundamental
goal and that is financial inclusion through the use of
digital technology which is an essential element in
furthering the economic development of Africa. Mobile
money services have become an essential, life-changing
tool across the continent, providing access to safe and
secure financial services but also to energy, health,
education and employment opportunities. One key example
to showcase our efforts in that area is our Ericsson Wallet
Platform that allows users to store, transfer and withdraw
money; pay merchants and utility providers; and use
financial services such as savings and loans.
With connectivity acting as a critical enabler of social and
economic change, sustainable technologies that support
the SDGs are the need of the hour. According to Ericsson
research, ICT solutions could help to reduce greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions by up to 15% by 2030, amounting to
around ten gigatons of CO2e—more than the current carbon
footprint of the EU and US combined. Examples of areas
where the savings can be enabled by ICT solutions are
transportation, energy, industries and agriculture. This is
reflected in our initiatives such as Ericsson Weather Data
and Mixed Reality for Urban Design.
Clearly, the SDGs provide a unique opportunity for
interesting discussions that will lead to more multi-sectoral
partnerships and opportunities that will help spur progress
towards meeting the goals.
Partnerships and Collaborations for Societal Impact
What is now needed is a framework that facilitates
harnessing the power of ICTs to foster inclusive
socioeconomic development across Africa. However, this
bridging of the digital divide – which promises to level the
global playing field so Africa can achieve its full potential –
requires a well-planned policy and regulatory environment.
A conducive, enabling policy environment that generates
regulatory certainty is key to encouraging market
development through partnerships, entrepreneurship, job
creation and knowledge sharing. Factors like:
Timely availability of ample, cost-effective and harmonized
spectral resources
Support of long-term stable network regulations that
uphold the principle of technology neutrality, stimulate
investments and foster infrastructure competition
Provision of free flow of data, while ensuring data
protection, privacy and security regulation
We at Ericsson Middle East and Africa are constantly
looking for opportunities to collaborate and engage with
partners across the board to facilitate such policy
development to fast tracking digitization across the African
continent and our recent collaboration with the African
Telecommunications Union is one clear example.
Fostering and Empowering Local Talents
At Ericsson, we strongly believe in the great competencies
of the local talents in each market where we operate and
for that we continue to offer our employees opportunities
that guide and supports them from a knowledge,
competence, and skill development perspective — to foster
an innovative, high-impact learning culture focused on
continuous development.
Additionally, coaching and mentoring are critical elements
of career development at Ericsson. We have best-in-class
mentors who guide our people in Africa through every
stage of their career, empowering them to seek more
learning and growth opportunities.
One of the initiatives we launched in-light of our efforts to
supporting young talents is our “Ericsson Graduates
Program “, a program that will offer fresh graduates a
chance to join experienced Ericsson staff for on-the-job,
online and classroom learning followed by recruitment to
join the Ericsson world. The program also engages with
young talents from Africa -the Change makers-to explore
and identify innovative ideas, that reflect and capture the
needs of the continent with an ambition to accelerate the
African markets’ digitalization journey.
The Change makers attend multidisciplinary sessions with
Ericsson specialists spanning across technology, business
and entrepreneur to empower and enable them to ideate
and work on their ideas in a well-rounded approach. Our
ambition is to continue with this program and train and hire
more fresh graduates in the coming period.
When it comes to empowering young talents and
innovation, we can proudly mention the Ericsson
Innovation Awards (EIA), a global competition that gives
university students the opportunity to turn their ideas into
reality by collaborating with EIA mentors. In 2018, a team
from Senegal has been selected as the overall winner of the
Ericsson Innovation Awards winning an amount of 25,000
Euros for their idea that addresses lack of school labs in
Africa. This year we are excited to launch the same
competition very soon and we look forward to receivin
ideas from young students from Africa and across the world.
Accelerating the Future
As we look ahead, it’s clear that Africa shows significant
promise for economic, technological and infrastructure
growth over the coming years. Yet, there are still many
challenges we must overcome if we are to deliver real
sustainable change for all.
While there are parts of the continent trialing 5G services,
majority of countries remain focusing on 3G and 4G as
smaphone affordability improves year on year. The
development of advanced wireless digital infrastructure is
an integral part of Africa’s growing economy. Mobile
broadband access has proved to be an essential driver of an
inclusive information society that integrates digitization in
all critical aspects of life, such as education, transport,
health, energy and even homeland security. Never has this
been more evident than during the current COVID 19 pandemic.
Ericsson focuses on assuring best performing networks in
Africa, while also offering the best digital services and
solutions to our customers. Our aim is to create a unique
customer experience evolving from networks adopting
automation, artificial intelligence and analytics. One of our
focus areas also is reducing time-to-market and flexibility
in launching services for our customers towards their
subscribers. From an operations perspective, we emphasis
driving service delivery efficiency through adoption of
advanced tools. We will continue our purposeful growth of
mobile broadband, fixed wireless access and fintech
services so that our service provider partners reach out to
further communities across the continent.
Our promise to Africa
Tackling the digital divide, continuing to build a robust ICT
infrastructure, promoting sustainability, innovation,
education and entrepreneurship will be critical for
maximizing the role of technology in boosting resilience
and inclusive growth in Africa. By achieving that, Africa will
experience a paradigm shift on all levels with new game-
changers as e-health, e-government and e-education; the
African society will accelerate into a much economically
advanced nation. However, collaboration between the
different stakeholders in the ecosystem becomes even
more important than ever to achieve this vision.
Our promise and commitment towards Africa are to always
support a world where digitalization is transforming the
eco-system; enabling sustainable growth, economic
development and opening up opportunities for all.
To accelerate our promise to Africa and achieve a true
impact, we are looking forward to supporting our
customers in their quest, bringing our latest innovation,
leveraging our global skill and scale to the benefit of
Africa’s digital development.
