Rwanda To Launch The First African-Made Smartphone

When it comes to smartphones, we’re seeing a lot of players from the US, Korea, Japan, and China. However, it seems that we could soon expect to see a potential player from Africa where it has been announced by President Kagame that there are plans the launch of a manufacturing plant in Rwanda for Mara Phones.

While this might not necessarily be a brand that many of us are familiar with, this is a big deal as it is said to be the first “Made in Africa” smartphone. According to the company behind the manufacturing plant, “Mara Phones just opened the first high tech, quality, affordable smartphone manufacturing plant in Rwanda. Mara Phones strongly believes that Smartphone manufacturing will bring huge pride to the African continent being locally made in Africa.”

Mara Group CEO Ashish Thakkar also boasted to Reuters about being the first. “This is the first smartphone manufacturer in Africa. We are actually the first who are doing manufacturing. We are making the motherboards, we are making the sub-boards during the entire process. There are over 1,000 pieces per phone.”

The Mara Phones have been designed together with Google under the Android One program, which should hopefully help make smartphones more accessible to the people of Rwanda.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Android, Google