The vehicle is Africa Data Hub Holding Limited, formed with a United Arab Emirates data centre investment platform founded by Tarek Al Ashram. MTN Group Digital Infrastructure announced the partnership on 27 August 2026, describing it as a platform to develop and scale AI-ready data centre capacity for cloud, enterprise, and artificial intelligence workloads.

Bayobab, MTN’s wholesale fibre and subsea business, is a shareholder in the venture and will supply open-access connectivity and go-to-market support through its pan-African network.

What has been committed, and what has not

The named elements are real. There is an incorporated vehicle, an identified partner, a defined starting geography and a stated role for Bayobab.

Everything a reader would use to judge the scale is absent. The announcement carries no investment figure, no megawatt target, no timeline, no named sites and no first project. It does not say whether the venture will build, buy or lease, nor what MTN is contributing beyond connectivity and its balance sheet.

“This partnership is a step forward in execution of our digital infrastructure strategy,” said Mazen Mroué, chief executive of MTN Group Digital Infrastructure.

That is a fair description of what has been disclosed. It is a corporate step rather than a construction announcement, and the distinction matters when the same operator has just committed nearly R20 billion of capital expenditure in a single half and simultaneously announced a share buyback of up to R6 billion. Against numbers of that size, a data centre platform with no disclosed capital is not yet a material commitment.

Why an operator wants data centres

The logic is straightforward. MTN already owns the fibre and the subsea capacity through Bayobab, and it already sells connectivity to enterprises. Data centres are the layer between those two, and the operator that owns the route into a facility captures more of the spend from cloud or AI customers.

Doing it through a joint venture rather than on balance sheet is also readable. Data centres are capital-hungry and slow to fill, and telecoms shareholders have historically punished operators for tying up capital in property. A partner that specialises in data centre investment carries part of that weight and brings development experience MTN does not have in-house.

The two markets chosen

South Africa and Nigeria are the obvious openers, and they are not equivalent problems.

South Africa has the continent’s deepest colocation market, established operators, subsea landings at both coasts and a functioning interconnection ecosystem. It also has a constrained grid, which is why every serious facility there carries its own generation.

Nigeria has the demand and the population, but its data centre growth depends on the power supply more than on capital or land. An AI-ready facility is a dense electrical load. Announcing one in Lagos is easy; energising it reliably is not, and the release does not address power at all.

What would make this a story worth returning to

Three disclosures would turn this from intent into substance: the capital committed and by whom, the first site with a target energisation date, and the power arrangement behind it.

Until then, the useful reading is directional. MTN is signalling that it intends to own compute capacity as well as the network that connects to it, and it has found an investor willing to fund that ambition. Whether it becomes concrete is a question for the next set of results, not this announcement.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) published a clarification on 14 August 2026, stating that it had received numerous requests for clarification regarding its position on the End-User and Subscriber Service Charter Amendment Regulations.

ICASA said it has “not conducted a market assessment or investigation that establishes collusion among the operators and no such finding has been made by the Authority”.

What was said, and when

On 11 August 2026, the Authority briefed Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies, where it raised concerns about what it called the shared industry position on the amendment regulations.

In the clarification, ICASA said the term was used to characterise its observation that competing licensed operators had arrived at aligned positions, and was not intended to suggest coordinated anti-competitive conduct.

Why the wording matters

Collusion is not a loose descriptive term in South African law. It denotes conduct prohibited under the Competition Act, investigated by the Competition Commission, and subject to administrative penalties. A sector regulator applying it to named licensees in a parliamentary forum is a serious statement, which is why the retraction followed quickly.

Operators arriving at the same position on a proposed regulation is also, on its own, unremarkable. Industry bodies exist to coordinate submissions, and licensees facing the same compliance cost will frequently object on the same grounds. That is lobbying, and it is lawful. Establishing collusion requires evidence of agreement to distort competition, which ICASA has now confirmed it has not gathered.

The underlying dispute is unresolved

The clarification does not settle the substance. ICASA said operators support the objective of the End-User and Subscriber Service Charter amendments, which is to protect consumers, while disagreeing with the Authority on substantive issues.

The statement does not specify which provisions are contested, provide a compliance date, or explain what happens next in the process. Readers looking for details of what the amendments require will not find them here, and ICASA has not published them alongside the clarification.

The Authority has had an active year on consumer-facing rules, having amended the numbering plan and licensed 18 community radio stations in recent months. The service charter amendments are the piece with the most direct bearing on what subscribers are charged and what recourse they have, which is why the industry response to them is worth following.

A GSMA report published on 20 August 2026 finds that 80% of Malawi’s population lives in areas with mobile broadband coverage but does not use mobile internet. The regional average for that usage gap is about 65%, so Malawi is well adrift of its neighbours on converting network reach into actual use.

“With 80% of the population still offline despite network coverage, the priority now must be turning access into meaningful use,” said Caroline Mbugua, senior director for public policy at GSMA Africa.

Coverage gap and usage gap are different problems

The distinction matters because the two require opposite responses. A coverage gap is capital expenditure: towers, backhaul, spectrum. It is expensive, slow and well understood, and Malawi has largely closed it.

A usage gap is not an infrastructure problem at all. It is the cost of a handset, the price of a data bundle against a daily wage, whether someone can read the interface, and whether anything on the network is worth the money. Building more towers does nothing for it, which is why coverage statistics on their own tell you very little about digital participation.

Smartphone adoption in Malawi sits at 33%. That single figure sums up everything else: two-thirds of the population cannot use mobile internet meaningfully, whatever the coverage map says, because they do not have a device capable of it.

What GSMA says is holding it back

The report identifies device affordability, limited digital skills, and structural investment constraints, including foreign exchange shortages and high energy costs.

The foreign exchange point is the one that connects to everything else. Network equipment and handsets are imported and priced in dollars. An operator that cannot reliably access foreign currency cannot import equipment predictably, and an importer facing the same constraint prices that risk into the handset. A currency problem becomes a connectivity problem.

The policy asks

GSMA sets out six priority areas: improving investment conditions, expanding rural connectivity through the Universal Service Fund, enabling mobile money growth, improving affordability, driving adoption through digital skills programmes and public services, and strengthening governance with a national digital economy strategy.

Two of the affordability asks are specific and testable: eliminating the 10% excise duty on mobile services, and reducing taxes on smartphones. Both are decisions a finance ministry can take in a single budget, and both are revenue the treasury currently collects.

That is the tension the report does not resolve. GSMA represents mobile operators, and lower taxes on mobile services is a position the industry holds regardless of the country. The argument that sector-specific taxes suppress adoption is well-supported, but the recommendation is also the industry’s longstanding preference, and readers should weigh it accordingly.

GSMA puts the prize at an additional MWK 1.1 trillion of economic value by 2030 if the reforms are adopted. That figure is the association’s own modelling, stated in kwacha as published.

The report follows the same template GSMA applied to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it argued digital reforms could unlock $1.4 billion. Kenya has taken a different route, committing Universal Service Fund money to a digital inclusion strategy rather than tax relief. Whether either approach moves the usage gap faster is still an open question, and Malawi at 12.5% penetration is a useful place to watch it.

The feature launched on 12 August 2026, International Youth Day, and is available in the 11 African markets where the Skills Academy operates. It sits inside the existing platform at skillsacademy.mtn.com rather than as a separate product.

What it does

The board recommends roles based on a user’s skills, location and stated career goals, lets them browse and filter openings, and tracks an application through to interview and offer stages. Where it identifies a gap between someone’s skills and what an employer is asking for, it points them at free courses on the same platform.

That loop, from job requirement back to a specific course, is the part worth noting. Most job boards tell you that you are unqualified. This one is attached to the training that would fix it, which is a structural advantage a standalone board does not have.

MTN describes the feature as AI-enabled but has not said what the AI actually does. Recommending roles by skills and location is a matching problem that predates machine learning, and without detail on the model or the matching logic, there is no way to assess whether the label is doing any work.

The number that matters is completion

Read the Skills Academy figures together, and the picture is more mixed than the enrolment total suggests. Of 526,000 enrolments since 2022, 192,000 have converted into course completions, a rate of about 36%. Completed specialisations, the deeper multi-course qualifications, number 1,122.

A job board helps the people who finish. It does nothing for the roughly two-thirds who enrol and stop, and that group is where the platform’s real problem sits. Free courses on a phone compete with everything else in a person’s day, and drop-off in online learning is a well-documented pattern rather than an MTN-specific failing.

The interesting question is whether visible, matched job openings change that. If seeing a specific role you nearly qualify for is more motivating than a course catalogue, completions should rise. MTN has the data to answer that within a year, and it would be worth publishing.

The demand side

MTN cites an International Finance Corporation estimate that sub-Saharan Africa will need more than 230 million jobs requiring digital skills by 2030, while more than 60% of the population is under 25. Operators are not alone in the space: Google has been running its own digital skills programme across the continent.

“Young people start from different circumstances, but they share the need for relevant skills and clearer routes to opportunity,” said Marina Madale, MTN Group executive for sustainability and shared value.

The constraint the announcement does not address is who is posting the jobs. A board is only as good as its employer side, and MTN has not said how many openings are listed, which employers are participating, or whether the roles extend beyond its own operations and partners. Those numbers, rather than enrolment totals, will determine whether this is a functioning labour marketplace or a well-built directory.

MTN also did not say whether access is zero-rated on its own network. For a product aimed at young people in markets where data costs are a real barrier, whether browsing jobs consumes a bundle is not a trivial detail. Other operators have made digital inclusion commitments that turn on exactly that question.

The Johannesburg-listed group said on 25 August 2026 that service revenue reached R115 billion in constant-currency terms, a 17.5% rise, while EBITDA before once-off items came to R56 billion, up almost a quarter.

MTN reports in rand, and the figures in this article are as published by the company. Constant-currency growth strips out exchange-rate movement, which matters for a group earning across 19 markets and reporting in a currency that few of them use.

Fintech is now the headline number

The mobile money business carried 70.8 million active users in the period, served by 2.3 million active merchants and 1.4 million agents. Transaction volume reached 13 billion, up 17%, against transaction value up by more than a third.

The gap between those two growth rates is the interesting part. Volume rose 17%, while value rose by more than 33%, indicating that the average transaction size grew substantially. That usually indicates mobile money moving beyond airtime top-ups and small peer-to-peer transfers into merchant payments, remittances and business flows, which is the shift MTN has been arguing for since it began reporting fintech separately.

MTN brought in Ant International in June to help build a MoMo super-app, a signal of the same intent.

Scale, and where it sits

The group closed the half with 317.7 million customers across 19 markets and 179 million active data users. Capital expenditure was nearly R20 billion.

Data users at 179 million, against a total of 317.7 million customers, mean roughly 44% of MTN’s base is not yet an active data user. That is the number to watch across the next several results. Data and fintech are where the revenue growth is, and the unconverted 56% is both the opportunity and the reason coverage alone does not translate into digital participation.

The buyback

MTN said it would repurchase approximately 31 million ordinary shares for an aggregate consideration of up to R6 billion.

A buyback is a statement about capital allocation. It says the group has cash it does not currently intend to deploy into the network or into acquisitions, and would rather return it to shareholders. Read alongside capital expenditure of nearly R20 billion for the half, it suggests MTN considers its investment programme adequately funded and its balance sheet comfortable enough to return capital at the same time.

“The Group’s overall performance in the period reflects strong conversion of the commercial momentum we see across our markets into growth in earnings, cash flow and returns,” said Ralph Mupita, president and chief executive of MTN Group.

Continuity with the full year

The result follows the pattern MTN set in March, when it posted record 2025 results and launched its Ambition 2030 strategy. The half-year figures suggest that trajectory held through the first six months of 2026.

MTN did not report headline earnings per share or free cash flow in the announcement covered here, and this article does not estimate either metric. Those figures appear in the full interim results, and they will show whether the margin expansion translates into distributable earnings rather than accounting improvements.

KINIX, the Kinshasa Internet Exchange, said on 20 August 2026 that it has moved its exchange infrastructure into Raxio DRC, the carrier-neutral operator’s Kinshasa facility. Public peering records list the exchange as present in both Raxio DRC1 and OADC FIH1, so the practical result is an exchange spanning two buildings rather than one that has simply changed address.

That distinction matters. A single-site exchange is only ever as available as the building around it.

Who actually peers there

KINIX carries 23 participating networks across 25 connections, on peering prefixes 196.223.28.0/24 and 2001:43f8:3c0::/64. The membership is more complete than the raw count suggests: all four of the country’s major mobile operators are present, with Vodacom Congo, Orange RDC, Airtel’s Celtel DRC and Africell RDC all connected.

Alongside them sit the content and infrastructure networks that make an exchange worth joining in the first place. Meta and Cloudflare both peer at KINIX, as do AfriNIC’s DNS infrastructure and Packet Clearing House. For an ordinary subscriber in Kinshasa, those are the connections that decide whether a social feed or a website loads from inside the country or from Europe.

KINIX says it currently exchanges more than 1 terabit per second of capacity and expects to pass 2 Tbps following the Raxio deployment.

A community exchange, 14 years on

KINIX was founded in 2012 and is operated by the Internet Service Provider Association of the DRC (ISPA-DRC) under the RDC-IX project, which runs three community and neutral exchange points nationally. Its purpose is the same as that of every Internet Exchange Point (IXP): to let networks hand traffic to each other directly instead of paying to send it abroad and back.

In a country the size of the DRC, with comparatively thin international capacity, every domestic conversation that detours through Europe is paid for twice, once in transit fees and once in latency.

Raxio DRC holds Tier III certification from the Uptime Institute, which requires redundant power and cooling paths, enabling the building to be maintained without taking equipment offline. For an exchange, that is the difference between scheduled maintenance and a national outage.

“The relocation will strengthen KINIX’s reliability and resilience,” said Nico Tshintu, operations director at KINIX, adding that it positions the exchange to “become a regional Internet eXchange in Central Africa”.

The regional claim has some evidence behind it

Regional ambition is a standard line in exchange announcements and usually arrives without support. In this case, there is some. Networks registered outside the DRC already peer at KINIX, including GVA in Côte d’Ivoire, Paratus, and AFR-IX Telecom, marking the beginning of cross-border membership that separates a regional exchange from a national one.

KINIX is also not the only exchange expanding in the capital. In May 2026, ACIX became the DRC’s first distributed internet exchange, spreading across multiple Kinshasa sites. Exchange points in Goma and Lubumbashi serve the east and south. Two exchanges competing for members in one city can mature a market or split it, depending on whether the larger networks join both.

Raxio keeps becoming an interconnection point

The deployment fits a pattern across Raxio’s portfolio, which spans Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and the DRC. Those buildings have been accumulating networks rather than simply tenants: in July 2026 AFR-IX lit up its network inside Raxio’s Angolan and Mozambican sites, and the group’s committed capital passed $380 million in the same month.

“Raxio DRC provides a world-class carrier-neutral environment,” said Yannick Sukakumu, general manager of Raxio DRC, describing the facility as support for “innovation, investment, digital growth and market access”.

Whether KINIX becomes the Central African exchange it is aiming at depends on something no data centre can supply: networks in Brazzaville, Luanda and Kigali deciding it is worth hauling traffic to Kinshasa to peer. The capacity headroom is now there. The members are the harder part.

The South African fixed wireless operator said on 20 August 2026 that it is entering the home broadband market as a wholesale infrastructure provider, selling capacity on a purpose-built 5G-Advanced network to internet service providers rather than to consumers. The expansion is backed by two new shareholders, Platform Investment Partners and Wimsey Capital, and follows the exit of Nedbank Private Equity after a nine-year investment.

Partners keep the customer

Comsol owns and operates the network end-to-end, while its partners retain the customer relationship, including branding, packaging, billing, and support. The company said it does not compete with the service providers it supplies and that its API-driven platform is designed to enable a partner to launch a branded offering within weeks.

The structure echoes the open-access model that reshaped South Africa’s fibre market, where the network owner sells wholesale and the retail brand sits with the ISP. Applied to 5G, it gives ISPs, mobile virtual network operators and smaller wireless providers a capacity option that does not depend on the mobile network operators they compete with.

Wholesale 5G is being tested elsewhere on the continent, not always successfully. Ghana stripped Next-Gen InfraCo of its 5G wholesale monopoly in July 2026 after the exclusive model failed to deliver the rollout regulators expected.

The gap fibre left

About 15% of South African households are connected to fibre, with the majority concentrated in dense metropolitan areas where trenching costs can be justified. That leaves a substantial suburban and peri-urban market where fixed wireless can be deployed faster and at lower cost, covering a town in weeks rather than months.

The category is growing. Regulator data cited by the company shows fixed wireless subscriptions rising roughly 39% year on year in 2025, while research firm BMIT expects 5G to account for as much as 67% of residential fixed wireless connections by 2029, up from 35% in 2024.

Competition among South Africa’s network operators has been shifting for some time. Smaller fibre operators outscored the country’s largest eight in an ISPA perception survey published in July 2026, a reminder that scale alone no longer decides who ISPs choose to buy from.

Spectrum, and a standalone core

Comsol received its C-band spectrum licence from ICASA in 2022, and holds what it describes as the country’s largest contiguous allocation of 28 GHz spectrum alongside 60 MHz in the 3.7 GHz band. The regulator has since mapped out its spectrum plans to 2030, setting the terms on which operators can plan long-lived network investments.

The company said its network is one of only two production 5G standalone cores currently live in South Africa, and that the design delivers roughly double the uplink capacity of a typical mobile 5G network, with dedicated capacity control that hybrid 4G and 5G deployments cannot match.

“Comsol anticipates where the market is heading and builds ahead of demand,” said Iain Stevenson, founder and chief executive of Comsol. “This is why we were investing in licensed spectrum years before its strategic value was widely understood and building private 5G before the market had grasped what it would enable.”

The company is not new to the technology. In 2018 it partnered Samsung on a 5G network in Soweto, one of the earliest such deployments in the country.

Who is funding it

Convergence Partners, a long-standing shareholder, is investing further growth capital alongside Solcon Capital. Stevenson retains his stake through Mactavish Investments and is also putting in additional capital. RMB arranged the funding package supporting both the shareholder transaction and the capital expenditure programme.

“Comsol is well positioned as the world transitions from 5G to 6G,” said Andile Ngcaba, executive chairman of Convergence Partners and chairman of the Comsol board. “The depth of its spectrum and nationwide network presence across all provinces creates a significant opportunity to serve South Africa’s enterprise, private and public sectors.”

Comsol is targeting full coverage of Gauteng by March 2027, with the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and major regional centres following in 2027 and 2028. The national plan calls for about 2,000 base stations. Whether the wholesale bet pays off will depend less on the network than on how many ISPs decide they would rather rent capacity than build it.

The financial services company announced the Companion Card from Gaborone, Botswana on 19 August 2026. It is linked to the existing Mukuru Wallet, so there is no transfer step before a purchase, and it works across all mobile networks.

The gap the card is aimed at

Botswana has roughly 4.21 million mobile connections in a population of 2.54 million, a penetration rate of about 166%. On Mukuru’s figures, 38% of adults remain without a bank account.

That combination is the point. Connectivity is not the constraint in Botswana and has not been for some time. What is missing is the account layer that turns a phone into something a merchant will accept payments from, and the card is an attempt to bridge that gap without waiting for banks to reach those customers.

Mukuru is registered in Botswana as an Electronic Payment Service Provider, a licence category that allows a non-bank to hold and transfer customer funds.

Why a card, and not just the wallet

A plastic card is a conservative instrument for a company positioning itself against traditional banking. It is also the pragmatic one. Card acceptance already exists at the tills, so a wallet that issues one inherits every Visa merchant rather than having to persuade shops to adopt a new payment method.

The trade is that spending now runs over Visa’s rails and carries their economics, rather than over domestic mobile-money interoperability.

“Our customers already trust the Mukuru Wallet to manage their money. The Companion Card gives them a new, practical way to use it,” said Thembani Moyo, Country Manager for Mukuru Botswana.

Transactions are protected by a customer PIN, online purchases use Visa’s 3D Secure authentication, and a lost card can be blocked from the phone. Access Bank is named as a supporting partner, with Shathiso Choto, its Head of Retail Banking, framing the launch as an expansion of access to regulated financial services.

Botswana as a market

Botswana attracts less coverage than Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa, but it has been steadily wired. Orange Botswana, EcoCash and TransferTo linked Botswana and Zimbabwe with real-time mobile payments with Zimbabwe, and Liquid extended cloud and cybersecurity services into the country more recently.

Mukuru has not said how many wallet customers it has in Botswana, what the card costs to hold or use, or how many merchants it expects to reach. Those figures decide whether this closes the gap the company describes or simply gives existing customers another way to spend.

The company, registered in Wilmington, Delaware, in the United States, announced the partnership on 17 August 2026. It took effect in the second quarter of 2026.

What a sponsor bank actually does

A payments company is rarely a bank. It needs a licensed bank willing to hold client money, clear transactions and take regulatory responsibility for the flows passing through. That is the sponsor role, and settlement banking is the mechanism that moves the money between institutions once a payment is instructed.

Without one, a fintech either stops at the border of what its existing partners will carry, or it holds funds in ways regulators eventually object to. Losing a sponsor bank is among the more common reasons a payments firm shrinks suddenly, because compliance departments periodically decide an entire category of customer is more risk than it is worth.

Afriex said the agreement brings faster settlement across supported corridors, access to global US dollar accounts, wider banking and regulatory coverage for licensed money movement, and more headroom as volumes grow. It also said the relationship lays groundwork for treasury, foreign exchange and global account services over the coming year.

From remittances to infrastructure

Afriex began as a consumer remittance app. It now sells access to its payment rails through a single interface to remittance providers, payroll companies, ecommerce platforms, other fintechs, banks and enterprises across more than 35 countries.

That shift, from moving money for individuals to renting out the machinery so other companies can, is the same move several African payments firms have made. Consumer remittance is a crowded business competing on price. Selling infrastructure to competitors is less visible and harder to displace once a customer has built on it.

“Building global payment infrastructure isn’t just about adding more corridors,” said Tope Alabi, Founder and Chief Executive of Afriex. He described the banking foundation as what makes transactions faster and more reliable for customers trying to scale.

Alex Goody, Chief Product Officer at Global Innovations Bank, cited Afriex’s compliance programme and its focus on emerging markets as reasons for the partnership.

The banking network behind the rails

Afriex already works with Choice Bank in Kenya and United Bank for Africa in Nigeria. Adding a US institution to that list is the point: the local partners provide licensed rails inside each market, while the sponsor bank handles dollar settlement between them.

The company is backed by Y Combinator and is registered with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as a money services business, the designation that brings a payments firm under federal anti-money-laundering supervision.

The wider pattern is of African payment corridors being rebuilt as infrastructure other companies buy rather than as consumer products. Central banks are doing a version of the same thing, with BEAC connecting Central Africa to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, while card networks and operators pursue it commercially, as when PayAngel partnered with Visa to speed African payouts.

What the announcement does not disclose is the commercial shape of the deal, the corridors affected, or how much of the $600 million figure passes through the new arrangement. A sponsor banking relationship is as much a dependency as a capability, and its value shows up only when the alternative is losing it.

The regulator announced the awards from Pretoria, South Africa on 12 August 2026. Each station receives both a Community Sound Broadcasting Service licence and a Radio Frequency Spectrum licence, the second of which assigns the actual frequency it will transmit on.

93 applications, 18 licences

The process ran from an Invitation to Pre-Register published in Government Gazette No. 51727 on 10 December 2024. Of the 93 applications it drew, 41 were admitted to the first phase. Nineteen of those met the pre-registration requirements and moved to the second. Eighteen were licensed, and one was not.

Roughly one application in five ended in a licence. Most fell away before the second phase rather than at the final evaluation, which suggests applicants were struggling with the entry requirements rather than being judged and rejected on merit.

Where the stations are

KwaZulu-Natal takes the largest share with 5 stations. The Eastern Cape and Limpopo receive 3 each, North West and the Western Cape 2 each, and Gauteng, Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape 1 each.

That covers 8 of South Africa’s 9 provinces. The Free State is the exception, with no station licensed in this round.

The licensees are a mix of non-profit companies, community trusts, youth organisations and faith-based groups. They include Bulungula Community Radio in the Eastern Cape, Lephalale FM and Sibasa FM in Limpopo, Cape Winelands FM in the Western Cape, Mahube FM in Gauteng and Mbombela FM in Mpumalanga.

Why spectrum still matters here

“Community radio plays a critical role in promoting access to information, supporting local development, fostering social cohesion and preserving South Africa’s diverse cultures and languages through storytelling,” said Councillor Ntombiza Sithole, Chairperson of the Committee on Sound Broadcasting Services.

Awarding FM frequencies may look like a legacy exercise while attention sits on satellite and mobile broadband. It is not. Radio remains the medium with the widest reach in rural South Africa; it requires no data bundle, and a receiver costs a fraction of the price of a smartphone. A community licence is one of the few ways a small organisation gets guaranteed access to an audience without paying a platform.

The awards come as ICASA works through a broader licensing agenda. The regulator opened satellite spectrum rules to hearings this month, and ran its final community television workshops in May as it prepares the equivalent process for community television.