Zain Malawi to Show UN's Ban-Ki-moon its project

On Sunday, Ban will be taken to Mwandama Millennium Village in Malawi's old capital city, Zomba.

Zain Malawi managing director Fayaz King described the UN heads' visit as an honour and motivation for the work the two telecommunications partners are doing at Mwandama in Zomba and Gumulira villages in Mchinji.

The two villages are part of a larger group of communities in 10 sub-Saharan countries that are benefitting from the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), a component of the UN's-advocated pillars for reducing poverty by 2015, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Significant progress

King explained that as spatial development partners, their specific role is to deliver on the telecommunications component so that people in these focus communities have steady access to communication in their different efforts that aim to reduce poverty.
"Since we started, significant progress has been noted and the UN heads visit should inspire us to do even much better," said King.

"Among the notable milestones achieved by Zain in the two areas include provision of toll-free lines to health centre personnel and villagers and payphones to community farmers. There are 160 beneficiaries of the toll-free line and 30 payphone operators in the area," added King.

In addition, he said together with Ericsson they installed an additional base transmitter station (BTS) to ensure adequate network coverage in the area which is in line with their long-term objective of making mobile telecoms technology easily accessible to people in rural areas.

King also explained that at Gumulira in Mchinji Zain has installed additional BTS and donated seven payphones and four kiosks to farmers and two toll-free lines besides connecting 20 traditional leaders of the village with handsets.

He said Zain uses the Closed User Group (CUG) technology, which allows for toll-free lines within the focus area but charges every time calls are made outside of the focus group.