TECH CONVERSATIONS

Ethiopia has awarded its first telecoms licence for $850m to a consortium including the UK’s Vodafone in what could herald the start of an opening up of Ethiopia’s closed econ-omy. The consortium, led by Kenya’s Safaricom with Vodafone and Vodacom, also in-cludes British finance development agency CDC and Japan’s Sumitomo. A bid for a sec-ond licence from South Africa’s MTN for $600m was rejected as too low and the licence will be retendered. The opening up of what is the world’s largest remaining telecoms mo-nopoly in a fast-growing country of 114m people had been billed by the Ethiopian govern-ment as the “deal of the century”.

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Dopek Pater

Telecoms Analyst and Director at Africa Analysis