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CIO Africa

Frehiwot Tamru Appointed Ethiopia’s Innovation And Technology Minister

Frehiwot Tamru, who has led Ethiopia’s national telecom operator Ethio Telecom since 2018, has been appointed Minister of Innovation and Technology as the country reshuffles its cabinet for the next five-year government term.The House of Peoples’ Representatives approved her appointment on Thursday, October 8, alongside Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s new cabinet. Frehiwot brings more than eight years of experience leading Ethio Telecom, during which the operator expanded beyond traditional telecommunications into digital financial services, e-commerce, cloud, enterprise solutions and other technology services.Her tenure has coincided with significant growth in the operator’s customer base and digital services. In the 2025/26 financial year, Ethio Telecom reported revenue of 215.8 billion birr, a 33.2% increase from the previous year, while its customer base reached 90.1 million. Its telebirr digital financial services platform had 60.59 million customers and processed 4.19 trillion birr in transactions during the year. The operator also reported 10,613 mobile sites, 82.2% national 4G coverage and 5G services in 33 towns.Frehiwot has also overseen Ethio Telecom’s expansion into areas that have become increasingly important to Ethiopia’s digital economy, including cloud computing, enterprise technology and digital platforms. The operator is currently implementing its three-year “Next Horizon: Digital & Beyond 2028” strategy, which includes further expansion in digital finance, cloud services, enterprise technologies and digital platforms. The company has set a target of reaching 100 million customers under the strategy.Her move into government comes as Ethiopia continues to develop policies around digital infrastructure, innovation, technology adoption and technology-driven economic development.Ethio Telecom has been involved in several national digital initiatives, including supporting Ethiopia’s Digital ID programme. Frehiwot has also represented the operator in engagements with international technology companies around areas including AI computing infrastructure, cloud services, enterprise digital transformation, smart industry, talent development and technology transfer.In July, she led discussions between Ethio Telecom and Inspur Software Technology covering areas including AI infrastructure, cloud computing and technology development. Frehiwot’s appointment therefore moves her from running one of Ethiopia’s largest technology companies into a role focused on the broader policy and innovation environment. Her experience spans telecommunications infrastructure, digital financial services, enterprise technology and the development of digital platforms.Her departure also comes as Ethio Telecom enters the second year of its Next Horizon strategy. For the 2026/27 financial year, the operator is targeting revenue of 295 billion birr as it continues to expand its digital and enterprise businesses.As Minister of Innovation and Technology, Frehiwot will take on responsibility for a wider national agenda covering technology, innovation, digital infrastructure, research and technology-enabled economic development.

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Ghafla Kenya

Britam Opens Global Investment Opportunities to Kenyan Investors

The Britam Enhanced Global Equities Special Fund and Britam Multi Asset Special Fund were approved by the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) in August and target investors seeking long-term growth and greater diversification. The special funds expand Britam’s investment offering beyond local markets as Kenya’s fund industry grows. Collective investment scheme assets reached Ksh948.7 billion in […]

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CIO Africa

What 2026 Is Teaching Us About AI And Quantum

AI is no longer experimental. It is a competitive requirement. Across East African enterprises, rapid adoption is exposing structural weaknesses in infrastructure, skills, security, and governance. The gap between ambition and operational readiness is where this year is being won or lost.Cisco’s 2025 AI Readiness Index found that only around 13 per cent of organisations qualify as Pacesetters despite rising investment. Real AI impact depends less on spending and more on disciplined, system-level readiness.Agentic AI has moved fast from concept to boardroom priority. In Cisco’s research with Omdia, 80 per cent of executives said their company’s survival will depend on agentic AI by 2027, and 87 per cent have already reshaped strategic priorities to support it. For East Africa leaders, the window to build foundations for agentic operations is narrower than local adoption would suggest.That urgency is reinforced by CEO sentiment. Cisco’s second annual survey of 2,500 CEOs across 23 countries, conducted in January 2026 and including African markets, found 93 per cent more optimistic about AI than a year ago and 67 per cent now worried they are underinvesting, up from 57 per cent. Nearly two thirds (64 per cent) treat adoption as mandatory for a modern business. African leaders see room to leapfrog rather than catch up, and their message to peers is that the opportunity is real and the time to act is now.AI adoption has moved faster than the foundations most enterprises were built on. Organisations are layering intelligent systems onto fragmented networks, siloed data, and legacy infrastructure, and the cracks show in performance, resilience, and security. Agentic AI, where systems act across applications, clouds, and data, has made this reckoning impossible to defer.What separates leaders from laggards in 2026 is whether infrastructure modernisation is treated as a strategic priority or a background IT exercise. Secure-by-design networks determine whether AI scales safely. For markets with infrastructure gaps, this remains a leapfrogging moment for organisations that modernise decisively. CEOs put the same problem at the top of their own agenda. Nearly half (48 per cent) expect infrastructure limits to hold them back, and upgrading infrastructure for AI workloads ranks as their number one priority for 2026, closely followed by upskilling teams.With connected IoT devices projected to exceed 21.1 billion, vast volumes of telemetry are generated daily, much of it never analysed in real time. In 2026, more AI workloads have shifted closer to where data is produced, enabling faster decisions and preserving privacy in regulated environments.The Middle East and Africa edge computing market, valued at around USD 1.8 billion, reflects rising demand across manufacturing, energy, logistics, and agriculture. As deployments scale, embedding security directly into the infrastructure is no longer a design preference, it is a requirement.Sovereignty has been a policy conversation for years. In 2026 it became an execution problem. As data localisation requirements tighten, organisations are making concrete decisions about where data is processed, stored, and governed. A growing number of African countries now have data protection laws that shape how enterprises design cloud and hybrid environments. The result is renewed interest in on-premises environments for sensitive workloads, and more deliberate balancing of global platforms with regional infrastructure.The result is selective migrations and diversified cloud strategies, driving demand for regional providers, local skills, and sovereign innovation ecosystems. For East Africa, this is as much a talent and competitiveness story as a compliance one. Fragmented data is already the biggest single brake on progress, named by 36 per cent of CEOs as the barrier holding AI back, and only 22 per cent of organisations have fully centralised, AI-accessible data. Where localisation decisions land will determine whether that picture improves.The rise of AI agents and hybrid human-digital teams has exposed the limits of static security perimeters. Modern security treats identity intelligence as a core cybersecurity pillar, requiring continuous authentication and adaptive governance across users and machines. When an AI agent changes roles and permissions in real time, conventional identity systems cannot keep up.Executives in the Cisco-Omdia research expect 55 per cent of their workforce will collaborate with AI agents within 24 months. That reality is arriving unevenly across East Africa, but it is arriving. Trust now depends on continuous visibility into who, or what, is acting, and how accountability is enforced when something fails. The concern registers at board level too. As CEOs move to put agents into the workforce, security and control of autonomous systems has become their single biggest worry, and Cisco’s 2026 AI Readiness Index finds only 39 per cent of organisations equipped to secure and govern AI agents.

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Ghafla Kenya

“Kenya Remains Safe And Open”- CS Duale Reassures Travellers After Single Ebola Case

Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale has reassured foreign governments, investors, and tourists that Kenya remains safe and open for business despite the recent confirmation of a single imported Ebola case. Speaking in Nairobi on Thursday, October 8, 2026, during a high-level briefing with diplomats and international development partners, Duale emphasized that the isolated incident does […]

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CIO Africa

What East Africa’s Banks Must Get Right

The same concern comes up in almost every conversation I have with a bank executive, whether in Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kigali or Lusaka: we cannot afford to be left behind.They are right to worry. Financial services in East Africa are competitive enough that technology increasingly determines who wins a customer and who quietly loses one. Expectations are higher, customers have more choice and tolerance for friction is disappearing.The constraint is rarely budget or appetite. The harder problem is knowing what technology can realistically do for your business, and then knowing how to execute against that. Plenty of institutions have the first half. Far fewer have both. That gap is where transformation begins to stall.AI is exposing it particularly clearly. A model is only as useful as the data it can reach and the systems it is allowed to act on. When customer records sit in different places that do not speak to each other, infrastructure cannot scale with demand, or every new requirement means another procurement cycle, the pilot never gets to become a product.Getting past that point requires work that attracts far less attention than an AI announcement.Data architecture, infrastructure, integration, governance, security, resilience and skills determine what an institution can actually build and sustain.The infrastructure challenge has changed too. Banks are balancing regulation, latency, cost,security, legacy investments and pressure to innovate faster. Public cloud may make sense for one workload, private infrastructure for another, while some systems remain on-premise. The question is no longer simply whether to move to the cloud. It is whether that mix can behave like one environment rather than five.I have spent much of my four years at Computech working on this challenge as we built our cloud business from the ground up. The lesson has been consistent: complexity itself is not necessarily the problem. Poorly managed complexity is.Resilience deserves the same attention. A bank makes a basic promise to its customer: the money is there and the service works. Every outage and every breach weakens that promise.Security, recovery and business continuity are commercial questions because their consequences reach customers, revenue, regulators and reputation. Prevention matters, but so does what happens when prevention fails. How quickly can the bank recover, and how much of the business can continue while it does?AI ultimately has to face a similarly practical test. I would rather see an institution put a model behind fraud screening, customer service or credit decisioning and measure what it changed than announce an AI strategy whose commercial value cannot be explained.Did fraud losses decline? Did decision times improve? Did the cost to serve fall? Did thecustomer experience improve? These are the questions that determine whether an investment survives the next budget cycle.Before joining Computech, I spent three years at Microsoft in the US. The technology available to a bank in Lusaka is much the same as the technology available to one in Seattle. The difference lies in what gets built with it.Working with financial institutions across five African markets has reinforced that lesson. Technology cannot compensate indefinitely for fragmented processes, weak governance or unclear accountability. Great companies need great people and sound processes before technology can do what it is supposed to do.For East Africa’s banks, getting ahead now requires more discipline than theatre. Know where the technology creates value. Build the foundations it needs. Put the right people and processes around it. Then execute.Banks have heard enough promises about transformation. What earns their trust is a system that works on the day you said it would.

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