Elias Biryabarema
8 May 2008
Kampala — The spectacular success Uganda has had in rolling out wireless telecommunications services is pretty widely known and acknowledged.
But less so has been the equally impressive but quiet success witnessed in the deployment of village phones to achieve what is globally termed Universal Access.
Universal Access to vital communications is a critical pillar of government efforts to achieve higher levels of welfare for its citizens, and more specifically, achieving one of the millennium development goals--halving absolute poverty by 2015.
Under a 5-year rural communications policy, the government of Uganda through the Uganda Communications Commissions, (UCC) has executed a number of projects that have brought cheap telephone outlets to areas with impossible challenges ranging from lack of power to physical inaccessibility. The investments are financed by the Rural Communications Development Fund which is capitalized by statutory contributions from all telecom operators.
"In the last five years we have made access to phones improve so tremendously that we now have one public phone per 1250 people in these rural areas," said UCC's Executive Director, Mr Patrick Masambu in an interview.
One of the projects that have played a preponderant role in achieving Universal Access has been MTN's village-phone.
In 2003, MTN Uganda together with Grameen Foundation established a joint venture company called MTN village-phone, to act as a vehicle to extend its telecom services in the remotest parts of Uganda.
MTN had planned to establish 5,000 new village-phone businesses in five years. But as an illustrator of the immense appetite for communications in rural areas, the phone units installed had, in just three years, surpassed that goal, reaching a profound 15,000 across the country.
The impact of the village-phones on welfare of locals in rural communities and their economic output has been immediate.
On average, a village-phone operator (VPO) sells five times more airtime than that used by a typical urban customer on his personal mobile phone, according to Mwami.
Most VPOs have been able to educate their children, access private healthcare and grow their businesses. Some have even expanded into other businesses which have helped to create more jobs within their communities.
Currently, village-phones are found in each district of Uganda and each phone on average serves 500 people per month, bringing telecommunication services to over 7.5 million Ugandans under the village-phone project alone.
Mr Masambu said the government's goal is to attain one phone per parish by 2010.
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What is now needed is to deploy this ubiquitious technology for the benefit of the citizens especially in educating them on nationalistic values; on what is at stake when they go to the polls. Most importantly the technology can be used to eradicate the rigging of elections. The voting process itself needs to be computerised; results ought to be made public expeditiously at each polling station where they occur as a matter of public record for everybody to see even before they are relayed to the central electoral authority. There is now speech recognition technology and other biometrics technology besides… [Read Full Text]