Digital Dividend
China and Africa join hands to build a community of shared future in cyberspace
In Kenya, electronic mobile payment platform M-Pesa is an indispensable part of local life. According to statistics from the World Bank, each of 96 percent of households outside the Kenyan capital of Nairobi has at least one M-Pesa account. Launched in 2007, the platform has become hugely popular because of a special function that allows users to transfer money and make payments using a feature phone service even when they do not have a smartphone, or their phone cannot connect to the Internet.
But a rapidly growing user base also brought technical challenges to the service. In 2012, due to a large number of users and weak platform capacity, the withdrawal service often crashed on Fridays.
To solve the problem, the operator turned to Chinese technology to help to build a more stable and powerful second-generation M-Pesa mobile payment service. Chinese telecom company Huawei Technologies Co. worked with M-Pesa to build up the platform which can support the use of the mobile pocket by tens of millions of users. Its business performance has greatly improved, and the downtime has been dramatically reduced.
This is also a prime example of mutually beneficial digital cooperation between China and Africa. Driven by the trend of economic globalisation and digital globalisation, Africa’s digital economy has expanded rapidly since the start of the 21st century. At the same time, as the world’s leading country in the field of digital economy, China has extensively cooperated with African countries to support the construction of “digital Africa” encompassing e-commerce, digital infrastructure, mobile payment and so on, helping Africa to enter the fast development track of digital economy.
Unlocking digital potential
In Africa, digitalisation is widely recognised as one of