by The Fikiria Desk | Apr 20, 2023 | Money
Rwanda knows how to write a strategy and how to launch a public platform. What it has never had in abundance is capital — deep domestic savings, patient private funding, a balance sheet large enough to absorb the cost of new infrastructure without help. So when the...
by The Fikiria Desk | Dec 19, 2022 | Money
Every submarine cable is sold as connectivity, but underneath it is a balance sheet. The PEACE cable entered commercial service this week with a landing in Djibouti, adding a high-capacity route between Asia, Africa and Europe. The headline belongs to the engineers;...
by The Fikiria Desk | Oct 6, 2022 | Money
A network switches on in a day; the balance sheet behind it was years in the making. Safaricom Ethiopia began commercial service on 6 October 2022, and for anyone following the capital rather than the coverage map, the more revealing question is not who now has...
by The Fikiria Desk | May 22, 2021 | Money
A licence bid is a promise made in cash. On 22 May 2021, a Safaricom-led international consortium made an US$850m one, winning Ethiopia’s first private nationwide telecommunications licence and ending the state operator’s exclusive position. The number is...
by The Fikiria Desk | Mar 8, 2021 | Money
Behind every launched network is a financing decision that most customers never see. A 4G rollout is a capital project before it is a consumer product: towers, spectrum, backhaul and imported equipment paid for up front, against revenue earned slowly in a fragile...