One Network for Regional Integration

Celtel International, an African telecommunications group, recently launched Africa's first borderless cell phone network. A common service, aptly named One Network, will be provided throughout Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. With no additional costs, it will enable customers, pre- and post-paid alike, to pay the same local rate wherever they are in East Africa.

As Allan Brian Ssenyonga reported in The New Times, based in Kigali, Rwanda, the new service has been

[T]outed by its architects as a major technological breakthrough in the history of mobile telecommunications in the world.

Whether or not it is setting a sophisticated example to the rest of the world, however, is not its most important facet. Rather, its potentially invigorating impact could be well-timed in a regional bloc that is only just beginning to pick up its trading momentum.

Last week, East Africa was revealed to have attracted a mere five percent of the foreign direct investment inflows to the continent in 2005, according to the World Investment Report produced by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). But as an article in East African Business Week pointed out: after South Africa, Kenya remains the highest investor in Uganda. It concluded that:

[W]e need to encourage more intra-African investment projects.

Why look very far when our economies and companies can be integrated to spur investment growth by themselves.

Celtel could have just made one of the strongest steps this year towards strengthening this regional integration.