Minister of Information Moses Kunkuyu says Malawi is registering progress in improving digitalisation in accordance with aspiration under the country’s vision – Malawi 2063.
Kunkuyu told YFM Online that since the signing of the Diplomatic Data Corridor with neighboring Tanzania and Mozambique, efforts have been made to connect Malawi to the undersea internet cables.
He said: ‘With the aspirations of government in Malawi 2063 but also the aspirations of the president that we digitalise every face of our lives and that cannot be achieved.
‘We signed an MOU with Tanzania, Zambia with the commercial agreement as well with Tanzania that we should be able to connect to the other cables through the state infrastructure of Tanzania and Zambia so that Malawi can have affordable but also quick internet.’
According to the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA), the Dar es Salaam diplomatic data corridor, a state to state negotiated tariff of data that passes through government owned infrastructure between countries, promises to provide the much needed affordable internet capacity into Malawi.
Negotiated at Ministerial level, the commercial agreement that will facilitate the transit of Internet Protocol (IP) capacity from Dar sea cables into the Electricity Supply Cooperation of Malawi (ESCOM) fiber, from where local data operators can tap and redistribute to the last mile; consequently passing the reduce tariff to consumers in Malawi.
The information minister added that with the introduction of satellite services, there will be wide range internet coverage across the country including in the remotest settings.
‘You are aware that we also have satellite services coming and with that we should be able to cover wide areas, but also the connection to the undersea cables through the diplomatic data corridors.
“If we do not have access if people cannot access the services through the construction of towers to provide the service. If they can’t access that, then the digitalization agenda will fall off the way,” said Kunkuyu.
According to MACRA, the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) ministries of Tanzania and Malawi is the giant step towards a greatly connected African economy.
