The Baobab room of the Radisson Blu hotel hosted, on Thursday, March 22, 2016, the ceremony to launch the works of the Workshop on the implementation of broadband in Mali, through broadband. The ceremony was chaired by Cheick Oumar Maiga, Secretary General of the Ministry of Digital Economy, Information and Communication.
He had by his side, Cheick Abdel Kader Koité, Acting Director General of the Malian Telecommunications / ICT and Postal Regulation Authority (AMRTP), the Director General of Sotelma / Malitel, Mohamed Morchid, the President of the Federation of Consumer associations, several other players in the sector and many guests.
The workshop was organized for economic, government, regional and municipal authorities, civil society, representatives of cybers centers, donors (WB, AFDB, EU, AED, USAID, ..) , operators and NGOs.
Among its main objectives, it aimed to create a dynamic, a governance structure and allocate adequate resources to it, to identify and focus priorities, to carry out actions with high impact and to make the actions sustainable.
Thus, for one day, the six working groups formed for the occasion were equipped by experts on several themes, in particular “Digital Mali, Challenges, issues and problems of e-inclusion, e-education, e-health, e-government; “Network and internet coverage in rural areas”; “Broadband services in the private sector – production and development – use”; “Training in ICT and human resources”, “Civil Society and expectations of youth”, “Legal aspect, regulation and connectivity, infrastructure”.
At the end of the workshop, the participants should be able, on the one hand to identify the bottlenecks to the development of broadband in Mali, to identify the missing infrastructures or bottlenecks in international, national and to access, to propose technical and tariff scenarios to accelerate the coverage of services and the reduction of usage tariffs, and, on the other hand, to identify the expectations of economic players in the industry and production in terms of services, quality, human resource needs as well as identifying the expectations of economic players in the service sector, for which broadband is an essential tool.
The representative of the Minister of Digital Economy, Information and Communication, Cheick Oumar Maiga, stressed the importance of the meeting. “The study on the implementation of broadband in Mali lays the groundwork for the first strategic axis, out of the six contained in the document of the National Strategy for the Development of the Digital Economy, entitled” Plan Mali Numérique 2020 “, adopted by the government in October 2015.
A strategic axis devoted to the generalization of access to digital networks and services throughout the national territory, “he declared. “With a market run by 2 operators holding global licenses and 3 Internet service providers, a fleet of 22,868,000 customers (fixed and mobile) and 3,114,000 Internet subscribers, a total turnover of 478 billion of CFA francs, 78 billion FCFA of investment made and a staff of 1,140 agents, the sector has a real need for development ”.
“In view of the above, a strengthening of the Internet market appears necessary, because it is only held, for the moment, by the two operators, Orange Mali and SOTELMA SA and some Internet service providers (ISPs) which also have enormous difficulties evolving in the environment of the duopoly market, due in particular to the narrowness of this market and the inexistence of wholesale tariffs ”recalled Cheick Oumar Maiga.
source: maliactu.sn
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