The tech giant intends to carry out this project immediately in order to bring access to the internet for the first time to remote regions in Egypt, Senegal and Angola, Microsoft president Brad told AFP. Smith, on the sidelines of a summit in Washington bringing together 49 African leaders.
“Africa does not lack talent but there is a huge lack of opportunities”, said Mr Smith, saying he was impressed with the engineers in Nairobi and Lagos.
As part of this partnership with the supplier Viasat, Microsoft also aims to facilitate Internet access to countries such as Guatemala and Mexico, as well as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to Mr. Smith, one of the major problems is access to electricity, while nearly half of the African continent does not necessarily have it reliably.
“For those who have never been there or don’t think too much about Africa, it’s hard to believe”, he said, considering that “electricity was the most important invention of the 19th century”.
Microsoft intends to concentrate its efforts to find cheap ways to facilitate access to electricity and the internet in the most remote regions, he assured. The boss of Microsoft again underlined the support, according to him, of African leaders who are quick to deregulate in this area.
“Even in countries where the challenge of authoritarianism arises, I think it is more likely that governments will want to control what is on the internet rather than its accessibility,” he said.
Today, some 5.3 billion people, or 66% of the world’s population, use the internet. Almost all of those who are not connected are in the poorest countries, according to a recent report on global connectivity from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).