China’s Huawei signs ICT development agreement for Southern Africa

China’s state news agency Xinhua said a memorandum of understanding signed by the organisations also aimed to “enhance ICT capabilities and literacy” in Africa and “extend advisory services on a regional ICT development plan”.

The head of Huawei's eastern and southern Africa marketing department Yang Hongjie told Xinhua: “As part of our commitment to this MOU with SATA, Huawei will have the privilege to make greater efforts to the development of ICT in Southern Africa with our innovative solutions and leading training resources.”

Tanzania’s government selected Huawei as its technical advisor earlier this year to help in the development of that country’s ICT sector.

Also this year, South Africa’s government entered into a 10-year partnership with IBM South Africa as part of a “research, development and innovation deal” to step-up investment in the country’s ICT infrastructure and boost training. Science and technology minister Naledi Pandor said the research programme would be centred around the establishment of an IBM research laboratory in Johannesburg to “focus on advancing smarter decision making, analytics, cloud, and next generation infrastructure”.

A report for the World Bank presented at the Investing in Africa Forum in July (40-page / 2.70 MB PDF) said China and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) trade had “rapidly intensified since the late 1990s and in 2013 China became SSA’s largest export and development partner”.

Figures from the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA), published in December 2014, indicated that total infrastructure funding commitments in Africa increased for the second year running in 2013, with the ICT sector among the key beneficiaries.

The ICA said commitments reported by its members, including the G8 nations, South Africa, African Development Bank, Development Bank of Southern Africa, European Commission, European Investment Bank and the World Bank Group, were up 35% compared with 2012, reaching a record level of $25.3 billion.

According to a joint report published by the World Bank and African Development Bank, with support from the African Union: “ICT innovations are delivering home-grown solutions in Africa, transforming businesses, and driving entrepreneurship and economic growth”. The report said that, at the start of 2012, Africa’s mobile telephony market was “bigger than either the EU or the US. Some 68,000 kilometres (km) of submarine cable and over 615,000 km of “national backbone networks” had already been laid to boost connectivity across the continent, the report said.

The African Union’s ‘action plan’ for Africa for 2010-2015 (104-page / 1.53 MB PDF) said access to advanced ICT is critical to the long-term economic and social development” of the continent.

“It has increasingly become essential that appropriate ICT infrastructure, applications and skills are in place and accessible to the population to close the development gap between Africa and the rest of the world,” the plan said.