The Master Card foundation has released $45m (sh113b) towards supporting vulnerable but bright children in Uganda. The grant is currently supporting over 5,000 children from 70 districts across the country. A total of 24 girls are benefiting from the grant at Wanyange Girls while an additional 16 and 22 are benefiting at Busoga College Mwiri and Tororo Girls School respectively.

The MasterCard Foundation is a global private foundation based in Toronto, Canada with over $5 billion in assets. The grant is being implemented by Brac Uganda, a Bangladesh NGO with roots in over 20 African countries.  Umbareen Kuddos, the Brac Uganda programme manager, told the press that apart from supporting education, they also advance Microfinance and youth learning to promote financial inclusion and prosperity in developing countries.

Worldwide, the foundation supports programmes in49 developing countries through collaborations with committed partners. "These programmes are serving more than 4.7 million people," said Umbareen.

She noted that the programme operating in 20 African countries is geared towards expanding access to learning, employment, entrepreneurship and financial services in a region where 63 percent of the population lives on less that $2 a day.

"The goal of the Microfinance programme is to expand access to microfinance and a broad range of financial services in order to improve the quality of life for the people in Sub Saharan Africa," said Umbareen.

From New Vision

Nairobi has seen the rise of Kenya’s first tech hub, iHub as series of investments have been initiated to promote the development of Kenya’s technology sector.

The iHub offers free internet access and specialist forums for entrepreneurs and promotes the innovation-intensive industries. Kenya’s tech hub, which was funded by Hivos and Omidyar Network, has been expanding continuously, becoming a benchmark for tech hubs in Africa.

It has over 10,000 members, over 150 incubated companies and the backing of multinationals such as Intel, Google and Samsung.

“The iHub turned out to be only the beginning of things to come, since as a result of its creation, a series of publicly and privately funded areas were set up with the aim of deepening Kenya’s commitment to upgrade its production sector,” Tomas Blanco, a research assistant at ASADEgeo in the latest frontier markets report.

“As a result of this public-private cooperation, several successful projects saw the light, such as the startup incubator, NaiLab, and the research and entrepreneurship institute, @ilabAfrica, inaugurated in 2011, followed by the startup accelerator, 88mph, in 2012, and the proposal to build a technology city which has been dubbed Africa’s Silicon Valley: Silicon Savannah.”

Blanco said this technology city project, planned to be carried out in four phases, the last of which is expected to be completed in 2030, will be built on a 2,000-hectare site in the city of Konza (a settlement 160 km from Nairobi).

Almost $14,500 million will be mobilised for this project, of which only 5 percent will be provided by the government.

The Kenyan government hopes this ambitious project will convert the country into a benchmark for the production and distribution of technological components in Africa.

This will create two hundred thousand jobs in the ICT sector and positioning Kenya as a tech hub of world renown.

The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Business Sweden - Swedish Trade and Invest Council, and communications group Ericsson on Thursday partnered to drive the development of information and communications technology (ICT) in sub-Saharan Africa.

The parties joined forces to strengthen and facilitate the development of the sector through knowledge sharing, assistance with the alignment of a country’s ICT aims and policies, and the promotion of collaboration between African countries and Sweden.

Business Sweden facilitated international business opportunities for Swedish companies.

Business Sweden trade commissioner Olov Hemström outlined a two-year programme of seminars and workshops, facilitating the gathering of key government stakeholders and representatives of Swedish companies, as well as stakeholders from the trade, ICT, energy and infrastructure sectors in ten sub-Saharan Africa countries.

Speaking at the launch of the partnership at the Embassy of Sweden, in Pretoria, South Africa, he said the series initially started in November in Lagos, Nigeria, and would be followed by workshops in Accra, Ghana, during April, and Luanda, Angola, in May.

Uganda and Kenya would be visited in September followed by South Africa in October. Next year, the parties would host seminars in Tanzania, Côte d'Ivoire/Nigeria, Mozambique/South Africa and Zambia/Zimbabwe.

Ericsson former head of the sub-Saharan Africa region Lars Linden said the workshops would be a “good vehicle to spread the gospel” and table suggestions and ideas on the most efficient ways of developing the sector, ensuring investment through aligned technology policies and the roles each party could successfully play.

The partnership, which would be funded mainly through Ericsson and the Swedish Foreign Affairs Ministry, would benefit both Africa and Sweden, he said.

Hemström cited ICT investment as contributing 30% to the gross domestic product (GDP) in the US during 2010 and between 30% and 60% of the GDP in many European Union countries in the period 2000 to 2009.

The aim was to duplicate this success in Africa with the aid of strategic partnerships.

Sweden had been undertaking technology development for a long time and it was now “time for Africa”, Hemström said, adding that the continent also held several opportunities for small and medium-sized Swedish companies.

“ICT is one of Sweden´s key industries and has made Sweden the top-ranked country globally in terms of connectivity, e-governance and ICT innovations,” the Ministry pointed out in a statement.

The experience and knowledge of the small country would bode well for African countries.

Sweden’s digital economy and Internet accessibility were top in the world, while its ICT structure achieved the world’s highest penetration rates.

The country of nine-million people boasted a 92% Internet penetration; mobile penetration of 135% - of these 44% used their mobile device for Internet access as well; and 20% fixed broadband penetration.

The ICT industry created a “large share” of the employment in Sweden and there was potential for a similar effect in Africa.

Ericsson head of the sub-Saharan Africa region Fredrik Jejdling reiterated that for every 1 000 new connections, 80 jobs were created; the doubling of connection speeds added 0.3 percentage points to GDP; and for every 10% rise in mobile and broadband penetration, 1% was added to the GDP of a country.

Sweden's Ambassador to South Africa Anders Hagelberg said that despite conflict and turmoil in some regions of Africa, the majority of the countries in Africa held positive and significant development opportunities.

Sub-Saharan Africa held seven of the world's ten fastest-growing economies and, over the past five years, recorded a compound annual growth rate of 40%.

The region – currently the second-largest mobile market in the world – was expected to surpass the US in terms of Internet penetration through its leapfrog into a rapidly growing mobile market.

It was expected that by 2015, 250-million of the current one-billion-strong African population would browse the Internet. Further, Africa was expected to be home to 1.5-billion young people by 2040, Hemström added.

Hagelberg added that South Africa and Sweden held strong links dating back decades and, post-1994, as South Africa emerged from apartheid, Sweden established strong developmental support.

Sweden now aimed to use South Africa as a platform and operational base, owing to its infrastructure, “think-tanks” and associated Africa-wide perspectives, to broaden its development and business into Africa.

Sony-affiliated Internet service provider So-net this week launched what it's billing as the world's fastest home Internet service in a limited number of prefectures in Japan.

The Nuro Light network, as the new service is called in a translation from Japanese, is "the world's fastest optical fiber service" delivering 2Gbps download speeds and 1Gbps upload speeds, according to reports.

Nuro Internet service will reportedly cost just $50 per month, or about 4,880 yen, for users in the Tokyo, Chiba, Gunma, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Kanagawa, and Saitama areas where it will initially be deployed. Nuro customers will get an optical network unit with three-Gigabit ethernet ports and support for 450Mbps over 802.11 a/b/g.

See PCMAG comparision with google internet

Access to broadband internet and satellite services should be prioritised because it will lead to greater economic growth in the East Africa region, Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi has said.

He said that unlike in the past where access to broadband was desirable, today it is a must in developing countries because it is an enabler for access to services such as e-health, distance learning, e-government, tele-marketing as well as for residential and community internet access.

This was in Prime Minister Mbabazi's speech read by the minister of ICT Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda on Monday at the opening of the East African regional conference on broadband and satellite communication at Speke Resort Munyonyo.

The 5-day conference organised jointly by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), the ministry of ICT and the East African Communications Organisation (EACO), was attended by over 250 delegates from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

Present was the Burundian minister for ICT Leocadie Nihazi, the director general of the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) Maj. Francoise Regis Gatarayiha. Also present was the Permanent secretary of Kenya's ministry of communication, science and technology Dr. Floren Turuka, and Ambassador Bruce Madete from the ICT ministry of Kenya.

Mbabazi said that improving the Information Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in the country could assist in enhancing the possibility of attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. He noted that ICTs are penetrating sub-Sahara Africa at a high rate and provide a backbone on which most businesses depend to provide goods and services.

The Executive Director of the National Information Technology Authority (NITA-U) James Saaka said that Uganda has 4.8 million internet users by December 2011 with an internet penetration of 3.2 internet users per 100 users.

Saaka also said NITA-U is in the process of setting up the national ICT backbone infrastructure with phases one and two having been completed.

He said the third phase will commence next financial year to connect Mutukula and south western Uganda.