Connecting Africa

Christina and Ruby are my two personal heroines of this week. I met them recently on my way from the airport after a long flight from Hong Kong. They both live in Langa, barely a 15 minute drive from the congress centre where this year’s World Economic Forum on Africa is taking place.

What they both have in common is that they are single mothers, raising children and their grandchildren in tiny huts. They have also both been mentored by the Family Strengthening Programme, run by the local team of the SOS Children’s Villages, a global charity with operations in 125 countries, looking after vulnerable children and families.

Christina and Ruby have been given the tools and support they needed to not only remain in the community and provide a safe home, but to build a future for themselves. Christina runs a shoe shop from a mat on the pavement and sews for the community with a sewing machine provided by the charity. Ruby runs a successful fish-and-chip shop with equipment that has also been provided by the charity. Meeting them was a deeply humbling and incredibly inspiring experience.

We kicked off our global partnership, Connecting Africa, with SOS Children’s Villages here in Cape Town. Using our know-how and global satellite network we are connecting 20 of their villages across 12 African countries, directly and indirectly benefiting approximately 700,000 people.

Thanks to a technical workshop organized three weeks ago, SOS Children’s Villages in Bakoteh and Basse in The Gambia are already online. The charity’s IT specialists across Africa have received training from our engineers, allowing them to connect the rest of the SOS Children’s Villages; they will also receive direct support from our operations centre in the UK. In other words, we have replicated the model the charity uses in its community programme. By doing so, we hope to provide better learning opportunities for children and the wider communities the SOS Children’s Villages support.

While this project might seem insignificant among all the talk of infrastructure investment and economic growth for Africa, we all know that what really matters is for people to prosper and children to grow up in secure and inspiring communities.

Author: Kevin Taylor is President, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, BT

Image: A Cape Town resident speaks on a mobile phone REUTERS/Mike Hutchings