As far back as 2006 Nigeria had started getting increasingly worried about how modern services could be taken to rural and remotest areas of the country that have no commercial attraction for service providers.
Besides telecommunications, which the country as at then discovered to be a money spinner and obviously strong economic booster, e-learning was also part of the services that needed to be transported to rural areas, particularly as this would improve the country’s computer literacy level.
Accordingly, government later that year created a Universal Services Provision Fund, USPF, which duty was to facilitate the achievement of national policy goals for universal access and universal service information and communication technologies (ICTs) in rural, unserved and underserved areas of Nigeria.
However, even with that, total connection or coverage of the country was still far off. For instance, the USPF, recently did a study of the unconnected rural Nigeria, after dividing the country across 207 clusters from the six geo-political zones and discovered that an estimated 36.8million people living in those clusters are cut off from whatever transformation technology has brought to their urban counterparts.
According to the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, the total number of subscribers as of July this year is over 150 million while teledensity has risen to about 110.
In the same vein, mobile internet subscription between the four GSM operators has risen to over 95 million; the sector attracts well over 24 percent of Foreign Direct Investment and contributes over 8.5 percent to the country’s Gross Domestic Product, GDP.
What this means is that the over 200 rural communities and their 36.8 million inhabitants are not part of these booties. While this could be a major national issue, it however provides a direction that the rural communities are where the next frontier of growth will come from.
To track this growth, the government through the USPF developed a public private partnership model to implement the access Programme it created. The projects, which are grants-based would be implemented through the provision of direct access to ICT services like e-learning and school knowledge projects by end users. They are expected to bridge the digital and information gap that exist in the rural areas of Nigeria and provide more e-learning facilities to the underserved areas.
Private partners
One of the private partners approved by the USPF is Softwire Digital Solutions, a Nigerian company providing IT and capacity building services.
However, to accelerate connection and provide services that would quickly leverage the rural dweller, the company has announced a partnership deal with a renowned satellite operator, SES to be able to use its NSS-10 satellite for the deployment of this ICT project, under the financing of the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF).
SES , is world-leading satellite operator with a fleet of more than 50 geostationary satellites. The company provides satellite communications services to broadcasters, content and internet service providers, mobile and fixed network operators and business and governmental organisations worldwide.
The multi-year contract means that Softwire Digital Solutions will be utilising SES capacity to implement countrywide e-learning solutions in Nigeria.
CEO Softwire Digital Solutions Limited, Dalo Edetanlen, said that “We are proud to be associated with SES, as they have the expertise and the technical know-how to help us achieve our goals in Nigeria.
Quality service
Our partnership ensures that we will deliver quality service to our clients, particularly the USPF. We hope to leverage this relationship to expand our business and become one of the leading ISPs in the country,” he added.
Reacting after signing the deal, Senior Vice President, SES Commercial in Africa, Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, noted that “many governments and public institutions on the continent have already begun to develop broadband policies to address this digital inequality, but again are hindered by costs, infrastructure and inaccessible, non-urban populations. Satellites have vast coverage and a reach that’s undaunted by mountain, desert, jungle or savannah” he added.
Digital communications and broadband Internet are increasingly important to Nigeria and the continent’s social and economic development.
It is hoped that SES satellite broadband technology would be able to deliver a wide range of services across Nigeria’s non-urban population, to help drive growth and knowledge transfer.
source from vanguard
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