"By empowering Individuals with the necessary skills, we aim to drive growth and innovation across the African Continent"
As 2024 comes to a close, we look back on a turbulent year with 4 major incidents around the coast of Africa, which each affected multiple sub sea cables, and caused connectivity chaos at national and regional scale. Diversity of sub sea cables, and long cross border terrestrial routes saved the day, with networks and services being restored in days, while the cable repairs themselves followed through in weeks or even months. But it was a steep learning curve for some network operators, with a complete rewiring of some networks in West Africa needing to be done, and the newest cables on the block, the Equiano and 2Africa cables, really showing their value.
I wrote an article back in 2016 entitled "Why More is Better when it Comes to Sub Sea Cables and Africa", which was a light-hearted piece on why the cables we had were far from full capacity or end of life, but we needed to build more anyway. I cited 6 reasons for why we needed to keep building Sub Sea Cables; Connecting the unconnected: Greater diversity; Increasing competition; New players in the market; Advancements in technology; and lastly Keeping engineers in a job. "The world has to keep building new cables in order to keep grey-haired engineers employed. Actually, they should hold off retirement just yet as the subsea cable industry is enjoying a major renaissance at the moment" I wrote...
With recent reports of my own retirement from the African Digital Infrastructure scene in Africa being somewhat exaggerated, it is time to reflect on retirement however. Just a few days ago, our old friend the SEA-ME-WE 3 (SMW-3) Cable retired for good in fact and was decommissioned from service. Linking Europe to Asia, but carrying African traffic by interconnecting to Africa at Djibouti and 2 landings in Egypt, this was the longest sub sea cable in the world until the construction of the 2Africa Cable. Its launch capacity of 8*STM-16 DWDM technology seemed revolutionary at the time, though luckily the infrastructure was able to take advantage of new technology to get a 100G upgrade in 2015, extending its working life up till December 2nd 2024.
But with all this retirement going on, and further more cables in the pipeline, perhaps its time to think about the next generation of skills to support the continent of Africa and the sub sea cable industry that is now critical to Africa's Digital Economy. Last week I was proud to take part in an event in Nairobi, driven by an Africa wide Industry led organisation that is aiming to do just that!
Africa Subsea+ Ecosystem Forum (ASEF) is an industry Led Initiative supporting the development of the Subsea Ecosystem and Industry in Africa. By driving innovation and collaboration, it aims to further support the global sub sea cable industry, which relies now on the cables which connect to, around and through Africa. It's workstreams consist of Policy, Technical, Industry and Education, and the Nairobi event was a gathering of experts on the first 3,with the main focus on Education for a new generation of young professionals eager to learn what the sub sea cable industry is all about, and where the career opportunities lie. ASEF says "By empowering Individuals with the necessary skills, we aim to drive growth and innovation across the African Continent".
In fulfilling this mission, ASEF invited over 100 young Kenyans to attend the event, where they got the chance to network with and learn from highly experienced professionals in the industry, including the Chief Technical Officer and Head of Architecture of Nokia.
I was quite frankly blown away by the quality and depth of the speakers. This was a true master class on policy, network building, sub sea engineering, the life cycle of sub sea cables. The opening keynote set the scene for the day, from Amb. Prof Bitange Ndemo, the "OG" of Sub Sea Cable connectivity coming to Kenya. When he was Principal Secretary of ICT in the 2000s, his landmark achievement was in bringing industry and government together to build Kenya's own TEAMs cable and landing 3 cables in Kenya in the space of 2 years. Further expert panels, interactive sessions and lightning talks packed what could have been a whole semester MSc course, into one day.
My favourite was the lightning talk from Amb Nancy Karigithu, Kenya's Ambassador and Special Envoy on matters of the Blue Economy. From her I learned new things about the laws of the international oceans, as well as the collaborations that countries and maritime authorities have, under supervision of the UN International Maritime Organisation (IMO). This was really inspiring and opened up new ideas on how African countries and industry players can work together to ensure we best protect our sub sea cables and networks. In order to facilitate better co-operation at Global Level, the ITU recently announced its International Advisory Board on Sub Sea Cable Resilience, and the Nairobi ASEF Forum included not one, but 2 (Jane Munga and Nomsa Muswai) of the Advisory Board's African members as expert speakers.
I must really thank the ASEF team led by Nomsa, as well as the event sponsors and speakers, for bringing this event to Nairobi for the first time. I look forwards to many more such events in Kenya and elsewhere on the continent, and looking forward to the new generation of sub sea cable professionals, taking up the reigns to plan, build, repair, operate, commercialise, drive policy and most of all, to take bold steps to invest into the next generation of Sub Sea Cables in Africa!
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