This GTB Innovation Award recognises an initiative taken to improve telecommunications services at a regional or continental level across Africa. The award was presented to Dalkom Somalia CEO Mohamed Ahmed Jama at the GTB Innovation Summit awards dinner in Piccadilly, London last week.

Services into Somalia were launched in February 2014. After six years’ of hard work in the face of extreme adversity (including piracy, shore-based unrest, etc.), WIOCC successfully landed the >10Tbps capacity EASSy submarine cable at Mogadishu. Already the impact on the country has been vast, and Somalia is looking forward to continuing development in the coming years.

WIOCC CEO Chris Wood commented, “working in partnership with our shareholder, Dalkom Somalia, we have fundamentally changed Somalia’s international connectivity landscape, bringing great benefit to one of the last ‘corners’ of Africa previously without direct fibre-optic connectivity.”

Other important areas of improvement include education, where classrooms are being supplemented by online libraries and digital classrooms, and public access to Government services – such as E-passports, E-National IDs and E-birth and death registrations.