The Mara group announced its plans to manufacture a smartphone in Rwanda and South Africa, making it the first high-quality, affordable smartphone made solely in Africa.
The Mara phone project, developed by Rwandan billionaire businessman Ashish Thakkar, is a partnership with Google, and will be exported and sold in Europe as well.
Thakkar sees affordable, reliable smartphones as a key to better education, healthcare and commerce, by increasing access to financial inclusion, micro-lending and micro-insurance services in Africa.
In an announcement at the Africa Investment Forum, Thakkar said that the smartphone would create “thousands of jobs directly and eventually hundreds of thousands of jobs indirectly in the ecosystem across the continent.”
Source: South African Government News Agency