Rwandan startup GIRA ICT is making smartphones and laptops affordable

The price of hardware such as phones, tablets and laptops has been highlighted as a significant roadblock to widespread internet adoption in Africa, and it’s the mission of Rwandan startup GIRA ICT to remove that roadblock.

GIRA ICT has partnered with manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, HP and Lenovo and linked them up with a simple model that allows consumers to pay by monthly instalments for their equipment in order to increase technology ownership across Rwanda.

The company started around five months ago and has already expanded into Ghana and Burundi, with the help of Kigali-based startup incubator kLab. “We started as a group of five entrepreneurs, so we came into kLab and they gave us a free space to work in, we could enjoy internet… they provided us with mentors,” GIRA ICT’s project supervisor Alphonse Ruhigira tells Wired.co.uk.

“As our starting point, we are trying to put more effort into sensitising people that this kind of solution is around here in this country. More are now more aware of what we are doing,” he says. “We can give any person in this country a gadget and he pays in four months or so — it depends on what capacity you have.”

The biggest challenge so far has been convincing the manufacturers to allow people to pay them in instalments, he says, but they were persuaded by the frameworks the company put in place to assess the income of consumers and their capacity to repay through local banks.

GIRA ICT has also been working with the government to create an accompanying scheme to the One Laptop per Child program. Through the scheme teachers are provided with laptops, the price of which they can pay off over four years. So far the scheme has helped around 100 teachers to buy laptops, and Ruhigira says that he is soon expecting the number to rise to 300.

The initiative was founded by Nadia Uwamahoro and has been recognised by the Rwandan government for its contribution to the country’s ambitious socio-economic plan to become a middle-income country by 2020.

“It’s a brilliant innovation and she is doing brilliant business,” says Jean Philbert Nsengimana, Rwandan Minister for Youth and ICT of Uwamahoro. “She’s taken computers to places where they were seeing and touching them for the first time by lowering the affordability challenge.”

Wired.coe.uk