At their 4th annual strategy and activity update in London yesterday, Orange telecom announced a bunch of products targeted towards users in the Middle East and Africa. The first of the bunch is their Orange Rural Electrification Programme, which is a set of micro-grids (or Solar kits) that will be subsidised by Orange. The project will under go a 6-month test-run in Ivory Coast, Senegal and Cameroon, starting this November. Asides from the CSR part of this, I suspect it’s all to get people at the bottom of the pyramid (the largest demographic) to start using their mobile money product, Orange Money.
They also launched a Smart electricity meter, which will be tested in Tunisia, NFC Coins, which is their contactless payments solution coming to Mali, Guinea and the Ivory Coast, and #303# My Store, an app store that lets service providers…provide services to users via USSD.
Source – Orange
