Spearheading Kenya's digital revolution

Huawei provides technology enabling country to surge ahead in efficiency

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the Chinese multinational telecommunications giant, is looking at helping Kenya accelerate its digital revolution.

The company which has been operating in the East African country for the last 19 years, plans to expand its broadband infrastructure investment in an effort to grow its revenues as well as help the country implement and adopt information technology in all sectors.

Dean Yu, chief executive officer of Huawei Kenya, says the company is committed to sharing its global experience with the Kenyan government and companies.

"ICT is fundamentally an important driver of sustainable development. With the increasing role it plays, ICT infrastructure investment is expected to bring a multiplier effect to economic growth in the years to come," he says.

So far, Huawei has enabled the roll out of the National Optic Fibre Backbone, a project aimed at expanding connectivity in all the 47 counties of Kenya. They are now connected, giving local people access to high speed internet.

Up to 2018, Huawei will give 100 internship opportunities to engineering students in their fourth and fifth years of study in universities. The initiative will see top 19 of these get a chance to further their studies in China.

During the recent Belt and Road forum held in Beijing, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta signed a memorandum of understanding with Huawei to build the infrastructure necessary for government cloud services and migrate government data and applications to the government cloud, as well as create a platform for government ministries to share data and communicate better.

The initiatives should improve government efficiency.

Adam Lane, senior public affairs director for Huawei Southern Africa, says that while Kenyan laws are strong, investment in ICT is lagging behind. He believes investment in Internet of Things and cloud may offer "leapfrogging" opportunities.

IoT is the inter-networking of physical devices such as vehicles, buildings and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators and network connectivity, which enable the objects to collect and exchange data.

It is said that every additional $1 invested in ICT infrastructure over time can yield up to $5 in GDP growth by 2025.

Lane says Huawei is looking at the digitization of key economic sectors in Kenya like agriculture, education, energy, environment, health, security, transport and water. He says these present huge opportunities.

Huawei is talking with the Ministry of Education about making education more accessible and flexible. This will be done using video on demand, live video and real time testing to enable higher quality teaching, more personalized content and better feedback on student and teacher performance.

"We are also discussing with the government the use of sensors, meters and more efficient transformers to significantly reduce loss of electricity in power lines. This could increase revenues from customers, leading to efficient power generation and enabling investment in additional generation," he says.

In the health sector, the company proposes to use digital devices to provide preventive healthcare, remote monitoring and diagnosis. This is in addition to collecting data aimed at improving government resource allocation, disease monitoring and patient treatment in order to improve public health.

However, Lane says there is a need to drive fixed broadband subscription to over 35 percent and 4G coverage to more than 70 percent to ensure that cloud can fully maximize the transformative power of big data and IoT.

edithmutethya@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 06/23/2017 page26)