Microsoft Launches 4Afrika Initiative To Spur Economic Development For The Continent

Microsoft Corp. has launched a new programme, Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative, which will help drive growth in Africa.

The Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative is a new effort introduced by the software giant through which the company will actively engage in Africa’s economic development to improve its global competitiveness. Its goal is to empower African youth, entrepreneurs, developers, and business and civic leaders to turn great ideas into a reality that can help their community, their country, the continent, and beyond.

Through the 4Afrika Initiative, Microsoft hopes that by 2016, it would have help place tens of millions of smart devices in the hands of African youth, bring 1 million African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) online, upskill 100,000 members of Africa’s existing workforce, and help an additional 100,000 recent graduates develop employability skills, 75 percent of whom Microsoft will help place in jobs.

According to Fernando de Sousa, General Manager, 4Afrika Initiative, “The world has recognized the promise of Africa, and Microsoft wants to invest in that promise. We want to empower African youth, entrepreneurs, developers, and business and civic leaders to turn great ideas into a reality that can help their community, their country, the continent and beyond.”

“The 4Afrika Initiative is built on the dual beliefs that technology can accelerate growth for Africa, and Africa can also accelerate technology for the world,” he said.

“This is not philanthropy, we are listening to Africa and Africa is saying trade not aid, and that is what we are doing.”

By 2016, the Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative intends to:

- help place tens of millions of smart devices in the hands of African youth,

- bring 1 million African small and medium enterprises (SMEs) online, and

- help 200 000 Africans develop skills for entrepreneurship and employability. This will include up-skilling 100,000 members of the existing workforce, as well as training 100,000 recent graduates, 75 percent of whom we intend to help place in jobs.

As a first critical step toward increasing the adoption of smart devices, Microsoft and Huawei are introducing the Huawei 4Afrika, a full-functionality Windows Phone 8, which will come preloaded with select applications designed for Africa. The phone will initially be available in Angola, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa later this month. The Huawei 4Afrika phone, which is the first in a series of smart devices designed “4Afrika,” will be targeted toward university students, developers and first-time smartphone users to ensure they have affordable access to best-in-class technology to enable them to connect, collaborate, and access markets and opportunities online.

Stylishly designed and available in variety of colours (blue, red, black, and white); Is a 10 millimeter-thin case phone,  is endowed with a variant of the Ascend W1, a 4-inch 480 x 800 display, dual-core 1.2 GHz Snapdragon processor, front and rear-facing cameras, a 4GB of internal storage and can deliver up to 420 hours (about 3 weeks) of standby time due to its built-in power-saving technology.

The new mobile which comes with preloaded custom apps created by African developers for African consumers and features a market-specific store within the larger Windows Phone Store for downloading locally-relevant apps and content  will be made available this month in Africa with a price tag of $150.

According to the GSM Association, an industry trade group based in London; Africa is the world’s fastest-growing region for Smartphones, with an average sales growth of 43 percent a year since 2000. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 10 percent of the 445 million cell phone users have Smartphones, but that is expected to increase rapidly as operators expand high-speed networks.

To improve technology access, Microsoft also announced the deployment of a pilot project with the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communications and Kenyan Internet service provider Indigo Telecom Ltd. to deliver low-cost, high-speed, wireless broadband and create new opportunities for commerce, education, healthcare and delivery of government services across Kenya. The deployment is called “Mawingu,” which is Kiswahili for cloud. It is the first deployment of solar-powered base stations working together with TV white spaces, a technology partially developed by Microsoft Research, to deliver high-speed Internet access to areas currently lacking even basic electricity. Microsoft hopes to implement similar pilots in East and Southern Africa in the coming months to further explore the commercial feasibility of TV white space technology. These pilots will be used to encourage other African countries to accelerate legislation that would enable this TV white space technology to deliver on the promise of universal access for Africa.

To help empower African SMEs, Microsoft announced a new SME Online Hub through which African SMEs will have access to free, relevant products and services from Microsoft and other partners. The hub will aggregate the available services, which can help SMEs expand their businesses locally, find new business opportunities outside their immediate geographies and help increase their overall competitiveness. As a welcome offer, Microsoft will provide free domain registration for one year and free tools for SMEs interested in creating a professional Web presence. The hub is expected to initially open in April in South Africa and Morocco and will expand to other African markets over time.

Matthew Reed, principal analyst with Informa Telecoms & Media said, “It appears that Microsoft has been looking pretty closely at what Google has been doing on the continent and has come up with a similar strategy, with focus on projects to fill in missing parts of the internet infrastructure, and developing sufficiently lower-cost data-enabled devices into the market to encourage the uptake of internet.”

Meanwhile, to accelerate capacity building and skills development, Microsoft has established the Afrika Academy, an education platform leveraging online and offline learning tools, to help Africans develop both technical and business skills for entrepreneurship and improved employability. Training through the Afrika Academy will be available starting in March at no cost to recent higher education graduates, government leaders and the Microsoft partner community. One of the first offline training sessions will take place with Microsoft-managed partners in Ivory Coast in the coming months, focusing on capacity building in business and technical skills for Microsoft’s partners in Francophone West Africa.

The 4Afrika Initiative will be tightly connected to Microsoft’s network of more than 10,000 existing partners in Africa today, a network it has built through more than 20 years of investing and operating in the continent. The 4Afrika Initiative will leverage these existing partnerships and create new ones across the public and private sectors to help advance common goals and to create value for Africans. Together with its partners, Microsoft has initiated various other efforts in recent months as part of the 4Afrika Initiative:

AppFactory ( South Africa and Egypt):

 Microsoft is hiring 30 paid student interns to staff the AppFactory — centers to which the public can submit requests for Africa-relevant Windows applications (Windows 8 or Windows Phone). These requests are being crowdsourced for voting, and the most popular ideas are assigned development resources to build and launch the apps in the Windows Store. Already, the AppFactory teams have built 73 Windows apps and 39 Windows Phone apps, and at full capacity, the teams plan to contribute approximately 90 new apps to the Windows Store per month.

Nokia and Windows Phone user training (Kenya and Nigeria):

 Microsoft has established agreements with Safaricom in Kenya and Bharti Airtel in Nigeria to accelerate local adoption of the Nokia Lumia 510 and Nokia Lumia 620 Windows Phones. In Nigeria, 95 percent of phones sold are feature phones. Through these agreements, Microsoft is funding in-store training for consumers who purchase these Nokia models with a data plan. The training explains the benefits of owning a smartphone, helping make these smartphones better understood and, therefore, more desirable for consumers.

Female empowerment portal (North Africa):

This portal targeted at North African women will launch in March as an offshoot of the MasrWorks IT skills portal. It is designed to empower young women to play a leadership role in their communities, build their skills and self-esteem, and introduce new models for self-employment. It will provide IT skills training and softer-skills training on topics including leadership, self-confidence and interviewing, as well as the mentorship needed to build a long-term career in technology. The mentorship will be provided via a sustained engagement between Microsoft, its partners, a local NGO and the beneficiaries to support them in career building and to plan their role in society as female leaders.

“We believe there has never been a better time to invest in Africa and that access to technology — particularly cloud services and smart devices — can and will serve as a great accelerator for African competitiveness,” said Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International. “The launches of Windows 8 and many other new products in the coming months represent a new era for Microsoft, which we believe will redefine the technology industry globally. These additional investments under the 4Afrika banner will help define our company’s new era in Africa.” 

 Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Middle East & Africa, Ali Faramawy said, “When we look at the world, many see China or the BRIC countries as the next big opportunity for growth. At Microsoft, we view the African continent as a game-changer in the global economy. We believe deeply in the potential of technology to change Africa, and we equally believe in the potential of Africa to change technology for the world. We are honored to plant this new seed for Africa, and together with our network of partners, we look forward to the next 20 years of growing amazing opportunities for the continent.”

The world has recognized the promise of Africa, and Microsoft wants to invest in that promise, he said.

Microsoft has been operating in Africa for 20 years, and today  it has offices in 14 countries.