World’s largest software maker Microsoft has shown some love for Africa by launching a $75 billion program in the region that will take around 1 million African businesses online. The program introduced by company, known as 4Afrika initiative, focuses on improving the global competitiveness in the continent as being online provides more working opportunities to businesses.
Right now only 5% people in African continent have high speed broadband access. This is fairly low for a continent as compared to the 10% of worldwide population. The initiative will provide business training to more than 200,000 workers of Africa and will help them in creating an online hub for business networking and for application development. According to Louis Otieno, Legal and Corporate Affairs Director of the project,
“The purpose of this is to find ways of engaging the continent on economic development and making it a globally competitive place.”
Microsoft will provide tens of millions of smartphones to the workers learning from the program and a cheaper version of WP8 powered Huawei Ascend W1 smartphone under the name of “4Afrika Phone” has been created for issuing on heavy discounts in the continent. However, no price has been announced yet for the smartphone. Along with smartphones, computers, tablets, servers and other necessary devices may also be issued in the continent.
Company is also working on a pilot project with the government of Kenya and with Indigo Telecom for the initiative. This pilot project makes use of solar energy powered base stations for providing high speed wireless internet access on cheaper costs. These stations will use the TV White Space technology of Microsoft for accomplishing this task. So by using these stations Microsoft wants to provide high speed internet access in the areas where even electricity is not available properly. The technology will take advantage of unused TV spectrum for providing internet access and for testing the technology in this continent first of all several clinics and schools will be connected together. Microsoft also hopes to convince other governments for using this technology.
The company is spending this much amount of money and innovation in this continent because it has large opportunities of scaling in the future. According to a survey report of Google Inc, this continent will have the fastest growing mobile communication growth in the upcoming years. Internet users count is being expected to touch the 400 million mark from current 100 million by the end of 2015. Google is expecting to start making a profit in Africa by 2017.
Source :nysepost.com
