African countries must continue to work with developing countries that exceed in technology to help improve connectivity across regions and ensure connectivity endeavours help address the needs and aspirations of the growing ICT sector.
This was announced at the first Future Sat Africa Summit 2016, which highlights and entrenches the value of Satellite Communication Technology in all socio-economic development endeavours of countries.
Organised under the theme “Digital Skies- Everyone Connected” taking in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the summit provided the platform to facilitate the implementation of satellite technology through an innovative blend of workshops, advisory clinics, conference programmes and facilitated networking.
Ethiopia is among the countries in Africa where communication solutions present a great challenge. It was in this context that communication infrastructure, generally of ICT had a great role to play in our development agenda, according to Debretsion G/Michael, Minister of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT).
When the world leaders signed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the UN in New York in 2000, it was expected that all concerted efforts and actions will be taken by all countries to ensure timely achievement of MDGs.
There are some countries that have made progress but the majorities of developing countries, especially from Africa have been found lagging behind and have not realised the targets of MDGs that were ended up by 2015.
“As part of the implementation of the MDGs, Ethiopia has made a progress by the construction of the Terrestrial National Optic Fibre Cable (OFC) countrywide. This currently connects all Administrative Regional and District Centres within Ethiopia so far covers a distance of 20,000km”, Debretsion who is also in the rank of deputy prime minister, economic cluster coordinator said.
Ethiopia has also been quite successful in implementing VSAT technology as an alternative for reaching the very remote areas of the country for education, health, e-participation and other services where territorial fibre network is impossible to reach due to geographic nature of the country, according to the Minister.
“It is a recent testimony that School Net and Woreda net were the most successful initiatives where Ethiopia has been considered as the role model in the African region.”
With geographical location challenges satellite can support terrestrial networks to fill gaps, provide reliable redundancy, back haul and provide affordable access solutions to sparsely populated areas.
According to a study by the World Bank, it estimates that economic growth rises by 1.3pc for every increase of 10pc in high speed internet connection. However, in most developing countries, extreme poverty remains a daily reality where more than one billion people subsist on less than one dollar a day and have meagre means to survive.
As part of the second Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP II), Ethiopia has been taking initiatives to utilise the space technology advantage, and a playground has been already set to start a detail research and development program in space observatory system.
“This plan is ambitious where Ethiopia needs to utilise the digital space technology in aspects of digital space connectivity inclusion and minimise the operational cost that is being allocated as a rental fee for the satellite operators. It is in this way that we can build the knowledge society”, he said.
The satellite communication service industry has grown more rapidly than was forecast in 1992. This growth has been a phenomenal global occurrence since the economies of the world have increased and improved a great deal, to the extent of requiring increased communication services for both business and consumer markets.
There are two things you have to consider satellite is very important for Ethiopia because one is the settlement of our people,” Esayas Dagnew, Chief Operating Officer of ethio telecom said.
“The second thing is the mountains part of Ethiopia mostly is very difficult to reach. There are mountains sync holes and it’ll be very difficult to construct fiber to reach very few communities with in the highlands of Ethiopia. So the only solution is again reaching them with satellite.”
