by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 20, 2022 | Property
A dam is the most visible kind of infrastructure and the most misleading. The wall commands attention, but the value of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam to the built environment lies in everything that is harder to photograph: the transmission corridors, the...
by The Fikiria Desk | Jan 13, 2022 | Property
A trade corridor is more than a road. It is the road, the port, the warehouse and, less visibly, the payment that closes the deal at the far end. East Africa has spent a decade building the physical side — the Northern Corridor from Mombasa, the Central Corridor from...
by The Fikiria Desk | May 22, 2021 | Property
A telecom licence is bought in a boardroom but delivered in the ground. On 22 May 2021, a Safaricom-led consortium won Ethiopia’s first private nationwide telecommunications licence, ending the state operator’s exclusive position with an US$850m offer. The...
by The Fikiria Desk | Mar 8, 2021 | Property
A 4G signal feels weightless, but the network beneath it is physical. Towers must stand on land, backhaul must run along routes, and equipment must be sited, powered and maintained in a country where those tasks are genuinely hard. Zain’s commercial 4G launch in...
by The Fikiria Desk | Feb 27, 2021 | Property
A payment system has a physical footprint, even when its product is a message on a phone. Somalia’s mobile-money network runs on agent shopfronts, cash points, telecom masts and the corridors that connect them, and for years that footprint grew without a formal...