Rwanda can not stop amusing us with its steady development from infrastructure to governance and now to technology, it’s now the first country in the whole of Africa to produce smartphones under its Mara Phone Factory. This developments despite the fact that smartphone sales are declining globally. Mara is the first high specification, affordable smartphone manufactured in Africa.
The Mara Phone factory is found in Kigali and was commissioned last week on Tuesday by President Paul Kagame is expected to produce over 1,200 smartphones daily for sale in Rwanda and abroad. This is a great achievement that opens up a great path for phone technology innovation in Africa and mainly East Africa.
Ashish Thakkar, the founder of Mara Group and member of President Paul Kagame’s Presidential Advisory Council, confirmed that the firm is in talks with regional countries including Kenya, DR Congo and Angola to export and sell the Rwanda-made smartphones.
Mara Phone Company had planned to expand elsewhere on the continent and open a factory in South Africa. Since the factory’s official launch, the sale of handsets has increased with at least 30 handsets sold per day between Tuesday and the time of going to press. In the past three months, the shop has sold about 130 phones.
The factory, so far, makes two phone models the Mara X and Mara Z retailing for $130 and $190 respectively. They are likened to the Nile X phones —an African brand phone made in Egypt with the help of China since 2017.
The Mara Phones
The Mara Z
The Mara Z is a dual sim phone with a storage capacity of 32GB and a memory of 3GB. Mara Z is designed in partnership with Google’s Android One Program. You’ll get the simple, secure and smart Android experience with the latest version of Android.
The Mara X
The Mara X is also a dual-sim with 16 GB space and 1GB memory. It has damage resistant 5.5” HD Corning Gorilla Glass screen, with an excellent viewing experience. Both models are pre-installed with Google’s Android operating system.
Established at a cost of over $50 million by the Bank of Kigali, the factory directly employs 200 workers, 90 percent of whom are Rwandan and 60 percent female to work in technology development, production, and assembly lines. Well let’s see how this works out.
The Mare is not the first smartphone to be made in Africa, we’ve had several attempts to design smartphones like the Pixan phones in Uganda.
