As the statistics showed in chapter six of this eBook, there are many under-served communities in Africa that do not have connectivity of any kind. Of course, all communities both need and deserve connectivity.
Thankfully, there are companies working hard to bridge that gap and help rural communities across Africa through the niche connectivity bigger providers can’t offer.
Letsogile Baloi, CEO, Kometsi Telecommunications, is doing exactly that.
Kometsi is a rural community-focused MVNO. They work with small communities with unique problems and requirements that are not typically catered to by the majority of mobile providers.
Letsogile said, “When we talk about the mobile market in Africa, the conversation is always about the explosive growth. But the reality is that significant gaps exist in rural areas. The gap between the connected and the not connected is huge.”
“We’re not just building platforms, we’re looking at the archetypes. Our focus is on niche community-based projects, such as building a data centre for a rural community in Botswana, and providing more connectivity to people across Africa.”
How MVNOs can help Africa get connected
The African mobile landscape is evolving, but the problem must be solved that many communities remain under-served. The agility and flexibility an MVNO can offer makes MVNOs well positioned to help solve this problem, whereas large MNOs are unable to focus on smaller communities and audience segments in the same way.
Letsogile said, “In our case, I don’t see an MVNO as a competitor to an MNO, I see it as an agile extension to MNO. MNOs have huge infrastructure, but sometimes MNOs can’t serve certain smaller socio-economic areas of the market because of the economics of scale.”
“MTN, for example, cannot set up a solution for 200 users. That’s where the MVNO can thrive in places like Africa.”
MVNOs can expand their solutions and contract them, both at speed. The smaller scale also means that MVNOs can immerse themselves into the fabric of the community they’re working on. Letsogile believes that immersion is crucial for MVNOs to deliver the right solutions to these kinds of customer bases.
This also makes sense in terms of the strategic direction many of our experts advise MVNOs to take. In order to succeed, MVNOs must have a highly focused, niche target audience who they know intimately.
Letsogile’s approach of gaining an in-depth, community-specific understanding of small groups of customers in rural areas aligns with that, and also provides a service that is somewhat unique to the continent of Africa.
Kometsi has developed an optimisation model for how you can actually tailor for this. Many MVNOs are unable to sufficiently conduct market sensitivity analysis, or understand the parameters involved in that, or change as those parameters change. Kometsi is looking to bridge that gap with its own intelligent modelling.
Connecting the communities
“Africa needs very specific and affordable solutions,” said Letsogile. “We also need to look at things like the seasonality of the incomes for the rural people that we’re working with.”
How can this be done?
1 – Bundles are usually commonly provided
2 – AS is the setup of Wi-Fi hot-spots.
“This has mixed outcomes,” said Letsogile. “But, in my opinion, they are still relevant and we need to relook at them and revisit them for them to be able to make any meaningful impact in society.”
“When I was working in a remote village doing market research, one child asked me, why we have bundles for Tiktok and we don’t have bundles for learning. It’s a simple question, but when you dig behind it, it’s hard to answer.”
“These are the things that we need to look at more closely. How would you design a user bundle for students in Kylita, for example? How do you make it sustainable?”
This is why it’s important to be immersed in the communities you’re serving as an MVNO, so you fully understand their needs and come up with tailored products to really help them.
Ensure delivery can be upheld
We all know that building a brand is what’s going to differentiate you. But Letsogile suggested the brand is often built around delivery.
It’s crucial to deliver your products to the people, and that’s a challenge in many areas in Africa.
“MVNOs are in a difficult position with the MNO on one side, and your users on the other side. You depend on the MNO to provide a good service to someone else. In some cases, depending on the MNO you chose, you may not have control of things that are happening on the delivery side of the technology.”
This is something MVNOs in Africa must be very mindful of.
Intelligent solutions for remote areas
To help bridge the gap for areas with very limited connectivity, in use cases like schools, Kometsi is using intelligent methods to help users get online.
Letsogile said, “We are actually working on an O-to-O solution, offline-to-online. Sometimes you can only go online for a short bit of time. To provide solutions in those kinds of scenarios, we can allow devices and apps to work offline by caching whatever the user was doing, and then you can go offline and you have access to it. There are a lot of things that can actually happen to extend the solution.”
How Kometsi is using a scientific model to strategise for MVNOs
“For MVNOs, I believe the future is niche,” said Letsogile. “We need to look closely at the under-served markets. But the question is how to do that, exactly.”
Kometsi’s unique model has been developed to help with an intelligent pricing strategy. It allows them to simulate the market and the market conditions before going into the market.
It uses parameters such as:
1 – The level of education in target areas.
Someone who has just done primary education has different user needs to someone who has done secondary school and then University.
2 – The digital literacy weight is also important.
3 – The economic multiplier is another.
And this model allows Kometsi, and MVNOs who use it, to truly understand the market they’re trying to serve on a highly specific level, and also segments different customer profiles within that market based on socio-economic and personal factors.
4 – It also takes into account an infrastructure multiplier from the MNO and the services that the MVNO is getting, helping to understand things like whether an HLR is needed.
This is a scientific way to gain a comprehensive picture for MVNOs to be able to come with a service to niche markets across Africa.
“MVNOs, by their nature, are sensitive,” said Letsogile. “MVNO pricing in rural communities is ultra-sensitive.”
In order to protect your investment, achieve ROI, and ensure the customers you’re serving are getting the connectivity and support they deserve, it’s crucial to conduct a thorough analysis of all the variables involved to inform your business strategy.
Key take-aways and guidance for MVNOs
Not only does Africa deserve pervasive connectivity through all areas, it also deserves providers who can actually guarantee the level of service and support required even in the most remote areas and diverse communities.
Taking a highly strategic, scientific approach will be necessary to effectively deliver connectivity to rural communities across Africa, to meet their very specific needs.
