The buzzing of a single mosquito is enough to break a good night’s sleep.
So imagine when that same sound is multiplied a hundred times – it can at best be described as eerie.
Especially when these mosquitoes are in a white mesh cage, in a vacuum-sealed laboratory, and it’s around feeding time.
It is at this opportune moment that Lizette Koekemoer, dressed in a red jersey and white lab coat, sticks her hand into the cage.
While most would squirm at the thought of dozens of mosquitoes making a blood meal of your arm, Koekemoer hardly seems to notice. For her, feeding mosquitoes is as normal as breathing; she has done it so many times she no longer gets itchy from the bites.
&#8220;When you are working on them, you learn to appreciate them as a living organism. When you put a mosquito under a microscope, they are actually beautiful. I think people laugh when I tell them I work on mosquitoes and I get paid for it,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
For 23 years, Koekemoer has been at the forefront researching these insects across Africa. She is part of the Malaria Entomology Research Unit on the 10th floor of the Faculty of Health Sciences building at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Koekemoer&#8217;s passion goes beyond the laboratory to barbeques where she gets excited to tell you what species you&#8217;ve just squashed on your leg, having been bitten more times than most she would know.
The reason we are here today, in this sealed laboratory with Koekemoer&#8217;s arm in a cage and mosquitoes sucking her dry, is to talk about a mosquito called Anopheles vaneedeni, discovered by her team on the Makhathini Flats, in northern KwaZulu-Natal (KZN).
&#8220;Anopheles vaneedeni has been known about since 1977, it has never – before now – been identified as a malaria-carrying vector in nature,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
Up until now it was thought two other mosquitoes, called anopheles arabiensis and anopheles funestus, were the main vectors of malaria transmission. Vectors are living organisms that can transmit infectious diseases between humans or from animals to humans.
<div id="attachment_34517" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34517" class=" wp-image-34517" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Lizette-Koekemoer_JC-6-copy-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="450" />Lizette Koekemoer sticks her arm in a mosquito-infested mesh cage in her laboratory. (Photo by Jay Caboz)</div>
It is not just a new carrier species that has Koekemoer worried. On the rise are mosquitoes with an increased resistance to insecticides.
According to the scientist, conventional insecticide-based mosquito control methods, such as bed nets and repellents are now becoming redundant.
&#8220;A mosquito&#8217;s whole body is designed to keep it alive. If you have one female that has formed a resistance, when she lays eggs, you then have gene resistance going all over the place. You need to monitor this and then move on to a new insecticide to kill those ones.&#8221;
While these methods may have proven to be effective tackling funestus, which prefers to feed on humans indoors, it means arabiensis and now vaneedeni can never be completely eradicated. This is because both arabiensis and vaneedeni snack on people outdoors.
&#8220;All malaria species are active from dusk to dawn. That&#8217;s their peak period. As soon as the sun goes down, they start feeding. People socialize at night, when it’s warm. They don&#8217;t go to bed. Bed nets only protect you when you are sleeping. They don&#8217;t protect you when you are outside cooking and socializing,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
Sterilized males to combat malaria
Back in the lab, it is Koekemoer&#8217;s job to come up with ways of controlling malaria vectors. One of the team&#8217;s more radical solutions is sterilizing males with radiation.
&#8220;We&#8217;ve got a gamma radiator. So it&#8217;s fast and quick – 60 seconds. We put the pupae in a radiation chamber, put them on a jig and then one minute later, they are sterilized.&#8221;
Called the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT), Koekemoer wants to build a rearing facility that will pump out 50,000 sterilized males per week. Once nuked, these sterile males are reared and released into the wild to mate with wild females.
&#8220;At a small scale, it works really well. The key to this research is female mosquitoes mate only once in their lifetime and if the male is sterile, she will not produce viable eggs. It&#8217;s like birth control&#8230; In the lab we have up to 96% reduction in progeny,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2017/05/01/rat-race-silent-killer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Rat Race Against The Silent Killer</a>
It has taken seven years of research to get to this point. Once built, Koekemoer estimates they would need R1.5 million ($113,000) to R2 million ($150,000) per year for SIT to run successfully.
&#8220;The thing to remember is a lot of research is done in colonized mosquitoes, in a controlled environment in a lab set-up. It&#8217;s difficult when you take this into the field, when your situation is a lot more complex and there is more than one species of mosquito,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
SIT was first used to control screwworm fly in America in the 1950s.
&#8220;It hasn’t been done with malaria, because malaria is complicated. Countries that are affected by malaria are also often not politically stable and financial resources are limited,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
The threat of new species? 
Although vaneedeni&#8217;s emergence is worrying, it&#8217;s not yet time to panic.
&#8220;To put it into perspective, we collected a large number of species. So percentage wise, it&#8217;s not high. Out of the 3,000 we have collected, we had one KZN sample that was infected,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
Vaneedeni is also considered a minor vector because the mosquito prefers to feed on livestock rather than humans.
The question the team are trying to answer is why now? One theory they have is because of the changing environment in KZN. At the time the team found the mosquito, the area was drought-stricken.
&#8220;We need to look at the bigger picture of the environmental impact. Was it a once-off because it was so dry? That&#8217;s what we need to determine. Your environmental factors influence everything. Because there was drought, the impact on the number of cattle available, or the availability of water might have diminished, which is their preferred host and sites. If you are the only blood source, then the mosquito has no choice but to come to you and you could get affected,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
The field site is naturally isolated, between a mountain range and the ocean, in the Mamfene district 60kms from Sodwana and close to the town of Ndumu. A team member collects mosquitoes twice a week throughout the year. The mosquitoes fly into clay pot traps and are then catalogued by species.
&#8220;The fact that we now know about vaneedeni means we can target our research towards knowing more about this vector’s behavior,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
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Until effective controls for outdoor mosquitoes are developed, eliminating local malaria transmission in southern Africa will be extremely difficult.
&#8220;Thanks to other malaria control measures, the number of cases is down to around 9,000 per year from over 60,000 in 2000, but it has proven hard to bring the insect population – and infection rates – down any further using the traditional method of indoor residual spraying,&#8221; says Koekemoer.
&#8220;There are countries that have resistance to all the classes of insecticides. There are only four classes approved by the World Health Organization for mosquitoes. In some countries, there is resistance to all four classes. It highlights the need to invest and start looking into alternative control methods.&#8221;
Coming up with new methods is a race to diffuse a ticking time bomb.
&#8220;These genes will eventually move into our borders whether it is the mosquito or the parasite, it’s only a matter of time, it will come into South Africa. You need to be one step ahead. If something happens, what&#8217;s Plan B? &#8221;
Thanks to a buzzing mosquito in a pot and a little radiation therapy, scientists are a step closer to solving the malaria malaise. Until then, it’s sleepless nights for them.
<div id="attachment_34518" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34518" class="wp-image-34518" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Lizette-Koekemoer_JC-2-e1511509351996-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="333" />Mosquitoes suck blood from Lizette Koekemoer&#8217;s arm. (Photo by Jay Caboz)</div>
<h2>Facts About Malaria</h2>
Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.
According to the latest WHO estimates, released in December 2016, there were 212 million cases of malaria in 2015 and 429,000 deaths.
The WHO African Region carries a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden. In 2015, the region was home to 90% of malaria cases and 92% of malaria deaths.
In 2015, 91 countries and areas had ongoing malaria transmission.
Between 2010 and 2015, malaria incidence among populations at risk (the rate of new cases) fell by 21% globally. In that same period, malaria mortality rates among populations at risk fell by 29% globally among all age groups, and by 35% among children under 5.
Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases, causing more than one million deaths annually.
[Source: WHO]

Birth Control For Mosquitoes – Is This The Malaria Cure?

Two boreholes, drilled deep into the Karoo wilderness, have thrown fracking optimism into the garbage can. The core samples go by the mundane names of KZF-1 and KWV. They took weeks to drill and cost $2 million. Between them, they have thrown into doubt the dream of unearthing enough energy to power Africa.
The discovery was made by teams of researchers, from the Karoo Research Initiative (KARIN), who spent more than a year studying the vast wilderness in South Africa.
“The more we see, the more questionable the entire thing becomes, whether it will be profitable or not,” says Wlady Altermann, Head of Geology at the University of Pretoria, who inspected the core samples.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5006" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Wlady-Altermann_JC-2-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Geologists found there is not as much shale gas in the Karoo as the government and energy companies claim. In 2009, Econometrix, South Africa’s largest independent macroeconomic consulting firm, believed there was 485 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas – the government and energy companies took this as gospel; it supported the case to open up the Karoo.
In May, research by Selwyn Adams, Principal Geologist at Petroleum Agency South Africa, which licenses onshore and offshore gas exploration, says their best model was 183 tcf.
Now, an even more lean estimate has emerged from Doug Cole, Senior Specialist Scientist at the Council for Geoscience (CGS), a parastatal mandated to research South Africa’s geology. He says there could be as little as 32 tcf, a fraction of the bigger amount that caused all the excitement.
By comaprison, 72 tcf is in Mozambique’s Offshore Area 1, one of the most important natural gas accumulations discovered in the last 20 years. The discovery, made 200 kilometers offshore in the Rovuma basin, alone is enough to add $39 billion per year to Mozambique’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2035.
“Initially I think they just took the volume of the base and didn’t consider the dolerites. It was obviously much too much,” says Cole.
KARIN was merely studying the geology of the Karoo and stumbled on the evidence.
“We have not seen a rock yet that would produce enough organic matter to produce shale gas in large amounts,” says Altermann.
“The conclusion of KARIN’s boreholes throws doubt into the original claim of the fifth largest reservoir of shale gas. From these two boreholes, the presence of shale gas is questionable, but this does not mean these results will be the same on other sites.”
The dolerites found could make it even more expensive to get any shale gas out. Unlike the shale gas boomtowns of the United States, the Karoo is littered with these dolerites – high temperature rocks – which burn off gas before it can be fracked.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5007" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Doug-Cole_JC-1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
These discoveries are likely to strengthen the case against fracking by farmers, who fear it could pollute water. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses millions of liters of water with a 1% mix of chemicals, to fracture the shale to release natural gas at depths of 1,500 meters. This could contaminate borehole water used by the farmers.
Unlocking the mystery of the risk to underground aquifers is Kate Robey, a 30-year-old hydrogeologist at the CGS.
“In the 1970s, a South African-based parastatal called Soekor was mandated to find oil. Shale wasn’t even known then. But, during those explorations they did find gas. It is based on this information from the 1970s that we think there may be shale now&#8230; It is old data that wasn’t even looking for shale.”
There were questions when Robey, who was on site when KARIN was drilling KZF-1, hit fresh water at 560 meters below the surface. They didn’t expect it.
“The Tankwa site, which went 560 meters, hit artesian water so fresh I couldn’t believe the probes giving me the results. I had to drink it myself. We never expected that. We expected the water to be more salty. It may even be that these deep aquifers are fresher than the shallow ones,” says Robey.
Although Robey says this is an anomaly, finding fresh water in Tankwa throws up more questions about fracking.
“Due to the sparse data we have on deep groundwater in South Africa (based on the Soekor holes) we expected groundwater at depths greater than 500 meters to be saline, which could be concerning if shale gas activities were to continue in the Karoo at great depths. If not properly managed or monitored, and there is interaction between the saline groundwater and the shallow aquifers in the Karoo, this could result in irreversible damage of the water.”
“However, on the converse, now that we found that there was fresh water at such depths, a lot more interesting questions and research needs to be undertaken. Such as can we use this hot water for geothermal energy or even as a future water resource?”
This is why Robey will be digging deeper in the heart of the so-called ‘sweet spot for fracking’ in the Karoo, near Beaufort West.
“We need to get these properties because if ever, one day, fracking does take place, it will prove if there is any pollution from the deep groundwater into the shallow.”
It could take up to 15 years to collect the data. In the researchers favor is the current oil price. The drop in commodity prices has given a vital lifeline for researchers to gather the data before legislation goes through. It needs to be above $70 a barrel to turn a profit from fracking; at the time of writing it is $47.17.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5004" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Kate-Robey_JC-1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Will fracking mean jobs?
“Let’s get rid of the rumors – fracking won’t benefit the lower class. The actual production through fracking would require high-end technology and expertise, which up to now, is not available in the country,” says Altermann.
“You don’t need people with shovels and hammers. It’s high technology stuff, skilled people will be flown in.”
A fracking future that seems far away.

The Fracking Future Fades

George Tafaria Waititu lived what many would describe as a life of a king. As the Managing Director of Ipsos Synovate, an international research company, he had power, influence and money. In June 2011, Waititu quit to pursue a childhood dream. Tired of building other people’s dreams; he decided to build his own – literally.
Waititu owns Tafaria Castle and Country Lodge in the Aberdare Range – 224 kilometers north of Nairobi. He went back to his childhood village with one aim – to conquer the brutality he experienced when growing up.
“The castle is supposed to transform my village from a dark age to a more enlightened age, similar to what happed in medieval times. This place molded my character and made me the person I am today. It is desperate for help and development,” says Waititu.
The castle, with medieval architecture, cost him $3.5 million to set up.
“I could have chosen to get into the lucrative real estate sector in Kenya and by now my return would have doubled,” he says.
Three years later, the investment has paid off.
Building it was a labor of love. After four years, he was able to open its doors in September 2012. Seventy percent of the construction was done by locals.
“People just need to be inspired, guided and supervised,” he says.
Along with roads and power, Waititu created employment and a market for locally-grown produce. The area’s development has also resulted in the value of land skyrocketing.
It wasn’t always easy; the project stalled several times due to a lack of resources. Waititu had to negotiate with his neighbors for land and water. Heavy rain also made it difficult to access the area before Waititu invested in a proper road.
He is proud of the transformation he has brought to his village. He is even prouder of the skills the villagers have gained.
“The rains can come and wash away the roads but the skills they acquired can never be taken away from them.”
Waititu aims to make Tafaria a model village and guide the development of the area.
“I don’t want to change the rural life. I just want to improve it without changing its rural setting.”
The source of Waititu’s inspiration can be found in his childhood. His mother moved to Aberdare from a crowded colonial village in Nyeri, central Kenya. Unlike the lush and fertile highlands of Nyeri, Aberdare is dry and hot.
The family lived in the bush, along with wild animals that roamed freely. They would wake up in the morning and find animals had ravaged their farms and killed people.
“The first funeral I attended was of a neighbor who was killed by a buffalo on a farm.”
Waititu remembers two serious droughts, forcing the family to survive on donated yellow maize.
“These things molded my character. That upbringing made me a risk taker.”
When he visited his family in other towns, Waititu’s eyes were opened. He saw vehicles, electricity and other amenities which he craved. That is where the seed of transforming his village was planted.
“I did not desire to leave my home; I desired to make it better.”
With the castle he built there, Waititu has achieved his lofty goal.

From Villager To King Of A Castle

She has been listed as one of the ‘12 Names to Change the World’ by the Spanish National Centre for Research on Human Evolution as well as one of the top 10 most influential women in science and technology on the African continent by technology news website IT News Africa.
That’s 62-year-old professor Tebello Nyokong from Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, who is breaking the boundaries of science in cancer research.
Meeting her in her office at the university, one is immediately drawn to her warm personality and the twinkle in her eye. By her own admission, she likes to laugh a lot, and loudly.
Yet, the work she does is no laughing matter.
As Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Nanotechnology at the university, as well as Director of the DST Mintek Nanotechnology Innovation Centre, Nyokong has attracted millions of rands in funding towards her research based on photodynamic therapy (PDT) of cancer.
PDT, which uses dyes and light, is already available for some cancers in the United States (US), Europe and Russia, but currently has strong side effects as the drugs hone in on healthy as well as cancerous tissues.
“Our whole aim is to make molecules that are cancer-specific so that healthy tissue will not be affected,” says Nyokong, going on to detailing the specifics, which any lay person would find hard to understand.
“In our research, PDT is combined with nanoparticles that absorb and re-emit light, thus enabling for visualization in addition to cancer treatment. In cancer therapy, nanoparticles act as delivery agents of the drugs selectively to the cancer tissue. This is due to the fact that cancer has leaky vasculature which allows nanoparticles to enter.”
Simply put, this means the drugs will specifically target cancer cells, which will see cumbersome treatments such as chemotherapy move into the dark ages.
Having overseen several formal collaborations with counterparts across the globe, Nyokong has also been awarded a prestigious Adjunct Professorship by the University of Tromsø in Norway and numerous international scientists have visited her laboratory. She has also hosted many postdoctoral candidates from around the world.
But she is quick to point out that her research is still in the pre-clinical trial phase and many years away from reaching the market.
Considered an icon in the world of science, Nyokong’s state-of-the-art laboratory is a far cry from her primary school days in Lesotho where as a child, she spent alternate days tending sheep and on the weekends, assisted her father who was a construction laborer. These tasks led her to conclude she could do anything a boy could do.
“At the start my father influenced my path. He believed that the apartheid system could only be defeated through education and I was encouraged to excel at a very young age,” she says.
And excel she did, having chosen art subjects for her matric, she changed to science two years before sitting her matric exams.
“The teachers accepted me after this mad move from arts to science and when I entered the University of Lesotho, I was greatly influenced by my lecturer, Dr Gray. After that I was driven by my desire to beat the odds,” she says.
Nyokong went on to obtain her PhD from the University of Western Ontario in 1987 and a Fulbright Fellowship for postdoctoral study at the University of Notre Dame in the US.
“I had academic loneliness, since there were very few women when I started. Now my past students have become professors and are my academic colleagues,” she says.
And she is excited and outspoken about Africa’s potential to excel in science.
On being awarded the National Research Foundation Lifetime Achiever Award last October, she says, “I am driven by being an African, completely, I’m passionate to see us succeed.”
And she is equally passionate when it comes to her students.
“I urge all young people in the country to study to the highest possible level [PhD]. The development of South Africa will depend on highly skilled labor. No country can have lasting economic growth or development without a solid science base. Science is thought to be hard, no, it’s not difficult,” she says. She wishes schools were not judged on their pass rate, but rather on their pupils’ abilities in maths and science.
Her work ethic is phenomenal and her research output has been described as simply extraordinary. In 2012, she published 51 articles, all of them internationally peer-reviewed; in 2013, she released 52 publications and 17 so far this year.
Nyokong admits she has a hectic schedule, between supervising students and attending scientific conferences around the world, which includes going to Oman this year for the World Academy of Sciences conference, where she will be the global representative in chemistry.
And when she’s not in the lab or traveling, Nyokong loves walking, as well as gardening, which she describes as “physical activity with a purpose”. She confesses a great weakness when it comes to beautiful bags and shoes and her ‘must reads’ are Malcolm Gladwell’s  David and Goliath
and Outliers.
A grandmother of two, her favorite holiday destination is Mauritius. As we end the interview,
3I ask her what it’s like to have come from a shepherd girl to a leading woman of science.
“Sometimes I think gosh, that is not me. I’m just doing my work, that’s all it is. I love my students and I embarrass them a lot sometimes.”
When she laughs, it’s from the core of her being. And with the list of honors and accomplishments she has garnered, no wonder she smiles – and the world of science with her.

From Shepherd  To scientist

<div id="attachment_326" style="width: 272px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-326" class="wp-image-326 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Airtel-037-262x300.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="300" />Manoj Kohli</div>
Forget oil and gold, there is new treasure in Africa—mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2011, Africa will have surpassed the half a billion mark in mobile phone subscribers and the number is rising. In 2008, there were 246 million and three years later, this number has nearly doubled.
Manoj Kohli is at the heart of this growing business as the CEO (international) and joint managing director of Bharti Airtel. It launched in November 2010, after acquiring Kuwait-based mobile telecommunications company Zain for $8.3billion. The company inherited operations in 15 countries, cementing its position as the world’s largest single country mobile operator.
As of March 31, 2011 the operator had 220 million customers around the world and $5.9 billion in revenue. At the time of this interview, Airtel had hit 50 million paying customers in Africa; its target is 100 million customers by 2013.
“The Bharti Airtel business is doing well and we are satisfied with our first year in Africa. We are making good progress on all fronts, in terms of financial performance, market growth, market share growth, cultural aspects, government relationships and brand equity. We are happy that the first year has gone very well,” says Kohli on the seventh floor of Parkside Towers, the Bharti Africa headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.
Bharti, the number one player in India, landed in Africa knowing that it was going to have to fight it out with established players like Britain’s Vodafone, South Africa’s MTN, France Telecom (Orange) and Luxembourg’s Millicom.
“India has a population of 1.2 billion and Africa has about one billion. India is very diverse; Africa is more diverse not only because it is large geographically, but it also has different communities, different countries and therefore different governments and regulations—whereas India is one nation, with one language, one government, one currency, one time zone, and one cricket. Therefore, in that aspect India is less diverse than Africa. Both have scale in terms of population and opportunity, but because Africa is more diverse, it makes it more complex. India has 13 to 14 competitors, which is not viable for any market. Africa has anywhere between three to five major competitors but the quality of competition is good,” says Kohli.
The Airtel brand made its presence felt by slashing call rates, sparking a price war in major markets. In Kenya, for example, where Airtel is number two—with 3.6 million subscribers by June 2011—there was a major decline in average tariff for on-net calls from KSh3.92 ($0.04) per minute to KSh2.67 ($0.03) per minute, according to the industry quarterly statistics in May from the country’s industry regulator, the Communications Commission of Kenya. Bob Collymore, Safaricom’s CEO, was quoted as saying that the price cut was “morally reprehensible”. Safaricom is Vodafone’s brand in Kenya. As the new kid on the block, Airtel was not letting up and Safaricom followed suit.
As Kohli looks back at Bharti’s performance in the last year, he says the company has established its brand. This, Airtel has successfully done by associating itself with the youth and the two big passions in Africa—music and football. In 2010, the operator brought together American R&amp;B musician R Kelly and eight African music superstars—2Face, Amani, 4×4, Movaizhalene, JK, Alikiba, Fally Ipupa, and Navio.
In football, Airtel has partnered with Manchester United in launching the Airtel Rising Stars program for under-17 boys and girls in 15 African countries.
The second major milestone, says Kohli, has been replicating Bharti’s Indian business model in Africa.
“It is still a work in progress, but all the initiatives of bringing in our global strategic partners like IBM, Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei have kicked off, which is a huge transformation for Africa. For example, IT education, training and employment will go up because IBM has come along with us to various countries in Africa.”
Bharti has entered into a 10-year agreement with IBM where the latter will install and manage the operator’s information technology infrastructure and applications in line with its objective of ensuring affordable and innovative mobile services in Africa.
In the coming years, Bharti has several strategies. One is taking networks deep into Africa’s small towns and villages not currently covered by mobile networks. The second is a wide distribution.
As Africa opens up, thanks to fiber optic cables, Bharti is keen on enhancing the internet culture in Africa through 3G data. Already, the operator has 3G licences in 12 African countries. In November 2011, Airtel was awarded licences to operate 2G and 3G GSM services in Rwanda.
Although Bharti is betting on 2G and 3G services to increase penetration, the telecom brand is also eyeing a mobile money service, already  a major cash-cow for Safaricom—to date, $1.8 billion has been transferred through its money transfer service M-Pesa, which was launched in 2007.
Kohli admits mobile money has been a small aspect in the business because in India, the business has had to comply with strict restrictions by the Central Bank. “Our M-commerce product will be a great differentiator for us in the long-term,” he says.
According to Jupiter Research, the number of active users of mobile money services will exceed 200 million by 2013. Nearly 40% of active users by 2015 are expected to be in Africa and the Middle East.
Looking into the crystal ball, 2012 will be about supremacy and transformation of wireless broadband. “There are many countries that are already mature on the voice side, but on the broadband, they would like to have more capacity and better experience. In Africa, where the average subscriber age is 18 years old, there is a propensity for youth to need voice (2G) and internet (3G),” says Kohli.
As far as mobile use in Africa goes, the only way is up; 2012 is likely to see massive investment aimed at increasing internet penetration through wireless internet.
The other growth will be driven by penetration into Africa’s smaller towns, not covered by wireless. This expansion will see the further growth of M-commerce as more of the unbanked population log on.
For new technology, Kohli says his company will test 4G in India first.
“Regulators in Africa will have to make licences for that and it could take anywhere between two to three years.”
Bharti Airtel will invest nearly $1.5 billion in its 2011/12 financial year. Also in 2012, there will be HSPA+ (an evolved high-speed packet access) to Africa. This will see internet speeds of up to 21 megabytes per second.
So does Kohli see more investors coming to Africa in 2012?
“I believe that in small countries, the viability of operators beyond the third is not likely. In small markets, I don’t think you will have more than three players. In larger markets, it could be four; I think that is the right level of viable competitive intensity for Africa, primarily because huge investments are required for Africa and it is very important that the operators are financially healthy for them to make all those investments in the coming five years.”
As a first-time investor in Africa, Bharti is grappling with poor infrastructure and power shortages. For a company that has to run its networks round-the-clock, it has forced the operator to turn to diesel generators which is obviously pushing up operating costs.
“That is why we are converting many of these sites to be run by solar and wind energy because the diesel cost is high and we want to avoid polluting the environment.”
The other hurdle for Bharti has been a high cost structure. The operator is benchmarking with its Indian operations, where costs are significantly lower. To deal with this, the operator is exploring economies of scale and sharing. “We are currently engaging regulators and competitors to support sharing of passive towers, networks and fiber optic. In some countries we have already had positive responses.”
In an earlier interview, Kohli told telecomasia.com that Bharti was talking with Etisalat, MTN, France Telecom, Millicom and Vodafone.
Bharti also has to handle the problem of weak telecom skills in Africa. “Ideally, we would like 100% of employees in each country to come from the country itself. However, this is not possible today because many skills are not available locally. Therefore, we have to bring skills from other countries in Africa, as well as from India. But we are determined that in the next two to three years, we will invest a lot in building these skills in each country and grow young African leaders to lead our operations in their home countries,” he says.
Kohli adds that, despite the challenges, Africa is still a great place to do business because of the available opportunities of growth and a growing population that is embracing technology. “In India, infrastructure only improved in the last 10 years. The cost structure is lower because India has a local manufacturing and service sector whereas in Africa, the manufacturing and service sector is not as big. India has gone through that improvement period in the last decade and I am confident that Africa will go through a similar improvement period in this decade.”
With unemployment plaguing the continent, Bharti wants to contribute towards job creation by involving young entrepreneurs in its business operations.
“We are developing young entrepreneurs who like technology and would like to sell technology as distributors of our various services and products. There is tremendous scope. Silicon Valley and India have many entrepreneurs doing outstanding work for value-added services, content creation, new applications. I am confident that in the next two to three years, young talent from Africa will also work towards development of new value-added services and applications.”
Kohli believes telecom can be the growth engine for the continent.
“Because the infrastructure in Africa is weak—roads, rail and air connectivity—it makes telecom an integrator that can bring speed, efficiency and productivity to Africa. With internet wireless broadband coming, I think the contribution of telecoms will be far greater in the next three to five years in building Africa into a strong economy, with growth going up from 4-5% and maybe 8-9% in the coming five years.
“India went through the same curve. We had a 4% rate of growth and because of IT and telecom, we have gone up to 8-9%.”

Tag: Research

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