Phase3 insists on scalable solutions to close digital divide

Stanley Jegede, chief executive of Phase3, West Africa’s largest independent fibre optic infrastructure and telecommunications services provider, has said that the firm is intensifying efforts to achieving its promise of re-defining West Africa’s telecommunications landscape, bridging challenging digital divide and fostering scalable solutions.

Jegede made this remark to newsmen, while assuring of the company’s unwavering commitment to achieving its promise. He reiterated that the country’s current economic clime is not a deterrent to increasing its contributions to rising global ICT initiatives targeted at making the internet accessible to all especially in the West African sub region.

According to him, internet connectivity is credited with providing far-reaching economic and social benefits as well as changing the lives of individuals with access to it – for the better.

He explained that the more planned projects in the country’s south-west and north-east zones are developments geared towards bridging a challenging digital divide and fostering scalable solutions that will see more people and businesses enjoy global standard connectivity solutions.

He added that “telecom providers can also start to push back at environmental and market limitations by proffering innovative, affordable and scalable solutions that allow more of the unconnected – who also live largely on the African continent – access internet connectivity.

“That Africa must start to leverage the dividends of connectivity on a far higher scale than it currently does which heavily impedes earning capacity and economic growth of individuals, institutions, industries and several other businesses thus producing low level of economic contributions on the continent in comparison to other global economies.”

Jegede also declared that although the importance of expanding physical infrastructure to drive affordability which is the major criteria for ensuring accessibility cannot be overridden, “but we must look beyond this and Phase3 is working aggressively to pull the right partnerships to offer scalable enterprise and converged service solutions that will see people especially in rural communities rapidly leverage the opportunities that the internet delivers.”

The chief executive Phase3 concluded by stating that the Company remains focused in tackling the sub-region’s digital divide as once fully realized; the benefits will touch multiple industries – from financial services, where lower cost of transaction will increase financial inclusion, to “education” where increased access to knowledge will have a lasting impact on the quality of education our children receive as well as “health” where people can use the internet to reduce the impact the distance from home to hospital has on health and well –being as well as the opportunity to tap into the wealth of health resources online.