Safaricom experiences an outage in Nairobi and Econet splits up
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS
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Today, in Uganda, the high court in Kampala will review a case petitioning the dual internet shutdowns the country experienced during the February 2016 polls. The Ugandan government had blocked social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter both during voting day and ahead of the swearing-in ceremony of president Yoweri Museveni. If the court decides in favor of the petitioners, it could also issue an injunction to prevent future blocks, an important step that could set a precedent across the continent.
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On Friday, Safaricom had a network glitch that affected a number of its customers in Nairobi. The fault (high temperatures) was detected at 7:56pm at their Nairobi Gospel Mobile Switch Room (MSR), per Techweez. This fault was labelled as critical and it rendered all services inaccessible to a number of Nairobians, which include mobile voice, mobile data, home fiber and SMS.
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Strive Masiyiwa’s Econet is spinning off its finance businesses into one separate entity called Cassava Smartech Zimbabwe, per TechCentral. The company will also sell its stake in network operator Liquid Telecom Zimbabwe back to the telco’s parent company.
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The Nigerian government has announced the National Broadband Penetration Programme, a public-private initiative to ensure the deployment of 18,000km of fibre infrastructure to Nigeria’s existing stock of 38,000km of fibre cabling. The announcement was made at the just-concluded 5th World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China. This is the second “broadband penetration” plan of the Buhari administration following the 2013 National Broadband Plan (pdf) which aimed to increase broadband penetration to 30% in the country.
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| This is cool: Taofeeq Adebayo, a PhD student in linguistics, is leading a pilot project to teach science to third-year secondary school students (seventh graders) in Yoruba, a language native to Western Nigeria. The project aims to see if “translation can be improved to meet their [students] classroom needs and how we can design the translation so that it is accessible not only to the students but also to the teachers.” |
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| The Mara Group has announced the Maraphone, a smartphone which it says will soon to be manufactured in plants across Africa. This is the second device to be made on the African continent, after Nigeria’s AfriOne debuted last year. |
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| Uganda has a new “Queen of Katwe”, writes Lydia Namubiru, for Quartz Africa. |
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Telkom Kenya has appointed Mugo Kibati as its new CEO. He takes over from Aldo Mareuse, who is moving on from the company having held the position since mid-2016. Kibati was previously Group CEO of Sanlam Kenya Plc.
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| You are invited to TC Townhall, Fintech 2.0, holding in partnership with Softcom on November 30. The forum will take a look at the next generation of financial technologies in Nigeria. Speakers include Adia Sowho (MD, Mines.io), Gbenga Agboola (CEO, Flutterwave), Titi Odunfa (MD, Sankore Investments), Dr. Yinka David West (Academic Director, LBS), Yvonne Johnson (fintech angel investor) and Yomi Adedeji (CEO, Softcom). Registration is now live, and seats are limited. See you there! |
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CcHub is hiring a Practice Lead for its ReLearn educational arm. If you are “Interested in improving access to quality education in Nigeria,” apply here.
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La Fin.
Have a great week ahead. We’ll see you tomorrow.
– Akindare.
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