East African Business Week

KAMPALA, UGANDA- Life in Mpondwe town on the Uganda/DR Congo border will never be the same as the Uganda Communications Commission and telecom giant MTN intervened to ensure that this part of the country is connected to the socio-economic development of Uganda through the use of ICTs.
The two bodies have set up state of the art solar powered internet cafes in the town worth $24000 to provide internet services in the rural western Ugandan town.
It has four computers and a server, three Pentium for both server and computers with a capacity of 1GB for computers and a higher capacity for the server.
The café also boasts of 10GB of hard disk space for computer and 40GB hard disk space for the server with a minimum internet speed of 128kbps.
"Use this facility well. It has been set up to offer ICT services to you the residents and those transiting through this border post," said Mr. Nyombi Thembo, Uganda's state ICT minister.He said dded that the Rural Community Development Fund (RCDF), a special programme that aims at bringing affordable and accessible communications services especially to rural underserved areas, was used to establish the facility.
Mr. Henry Lyazi, the RCDF director at UCC indicted that the body contributed $12,000 (about Shs30m) towards the establishment of the facility.
"It is imperative that the course content offered by the cafes should include introduction to computers, word processing, spreadsheets and specialized packages such as database management," said Lyazi.
MTN Uganda CEO Themba Khumalo  appreciation to UCC for the initiative .