16 December 2025

In its push to become a cashless economy by 2024, the Government of Rwanda has made heavy investments in digital infrastructure, and mobile money swiftly became one of the nation’s go-to channels for transactions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that shift was even more dramatic: mobile money transaction values soared, jumping from RWF 3 trillion in 2019 to RWF 10 trillion in 2021.

But then growth began to plateau. Despite what many believed was good overall network coverage, a closer look revealed a major barrier to reaching their digital-economy goals: poor connectivity, especially outside urban areas. In rural zones and small towns, network reliability and capacity issues were undermining efforts to drive widespread adoption of digital payments.

16 December 2025

As demand for fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks surged across South Africa, engineering consultancy EES Live (Pty) Ltd found itself wrestling with increasingly complex design workloads. Traditional design tools — a patchwork of desktop GIS software, static maps, spreadsheets, and manually assembled bills of materials — were slowing projects down and creating significant room for costly errors.

Engineers regularly had to switch between different applications to map routes, validate addresses, assign splice points, calculate cable lengths, and prepare construction documents. Because none of these systems talked to each other, the team struggled with version control issues, inconsistent datasets, and long feedback loops. Every project required re-building documentation from scratch and repeatedly verifying that the design still aligned with real customer locations and actual field conditions. As the firm’s client base expanded and deadlines tightened, the risk of rework — or, worse, misaligned fibre builds — became increasingly problematic.