Rural Telephony, Off-grid Power, and Other Reports

Every week, RuralReporters.com collate reports on development issues in rural Africa and its environs.

This report includes some of our top picks from recent must-read research, interviews, blogs, and in-depth articles, carefully selected to help you keep up with global issues.

Here are some of the updates you may have missed from the previous week:

Nigeria: 35% Drop in Investment Hobbles Rural Telephony

Expansion of telecommunications services by network operators to rural areas has slowed down drastically.

Investments have gone down by as much as 35 per cent and many operators are shutting down their sites due to the high cost of deploying services.

In fact, although the telecommunications revolution is 18 years this month, about 205 Nigerian communities still do not have access to the technology.

Off-grid power has put rural Kenya on inclusion path

Connection to off-grid solar and appliances is unlocking new economic activities in low-income communities across Kenya.

This is driving greater economic inclusion for millions of people and helping us reach our Vision 2030 targets.

Vision 2030 points Kenya towards being an industrialising, middle income status country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens in a clean and secure environment. Clean, renewable power is absolutely central to this.

200 Rural Network Sites to be Launched in South Africa

Telecommunications company, Vodacom has announced that it will be launching over 200 new rural network sites across South Africa. The move forms part of the mobile operator’s rural coverage programme.

According to the Vodacom, areas with schools, hospitals, police stations, and transport hubs will be prioritized to benefit from its improved connectivity.

Success stories from Africa – Women’s cooperatives in rural Ethiopia

According to Letty Chiwara, the United Nations women representative for Ethiopia, agricultural cooperatives — especially those established by women in rural areas — play a key role in enhancing productivity through sustainable farming practices.

“Injecting basic labour and time-saving technologies, along with the relevant knowledge, to smallholder women farmers’ cooperatives are critical elements in the sustainable escalation of the value chain in agriculture. This, in turn, results in quality of life improvements for women farmers and communities at large,” she says.

Launched in the regions of Afar and Oromia in 2014, the five year programme works with 10 cooperatives, with 48 to 516 members each. Beyond the more than 2 000 direct beneficiaries, 14 000 family members and 32 000 community members are benefiting indirectly.

Tribal chiefs face reckoning over rights to South Africa’s rural homelands

A hardscrabble patch of South Africa disputed between black farmers and tribal leaders working with platinum mining interests is legal ground zero in a battle to loosen the chiefs’ grip on communal lands.

Land rights are a hot-button issue ahead of elections in 2019 as the African National Congress (ANC) moves forward with a constitutional amendment aimed at a more equitable distribution of land, including possibly expropriating land from whites without compensation.

The names of 139 farms to be expropriated ‘can’t be made public’

The rural development and land reform ministry says they will deal confidentially with people, and can’t name the farms to Sakeliga.

Land expropriation without compensation will be handled confidentially between individual land owners affected and government, according to rural development and land reform ministry head Mashile Mokono.

Law and policy analyst at Sakeliga, previously known as AfriBusiness, Armand Greyling said his organisation had served an application requesting the department to provide the names of the farms. But Mokono said this was “unlikely to happen”.

An Open Letter To African Youth: The Africa We Want, Always Possible, Yes We Can

With African youth moving out of cities to roll up sleeves with rural Africa through knowledge sharing and skills exchange, the gap between rural Africa and Urban Africa can be bridged. Thus, African youth realizing that an opportunity to serve in rural Africa is not a punishment but a platform to write your own story in an African way by touching lives and bringing hope at the doorstep of communities in need. It is indeed an opportunity for shaping goals, visions and destinies of Nations.

Governance and leadership is a major cause of underdevelopment in many developing nations especially in Africa and this has been one of the major concerns of African youth. It’s very true some countries in Africa are still struggling with who should lead, who qualifies to lead and who can lead best. We keep complaining about poor leadership grossly exhibited by some African leaders.