Author: Michael Daniel | Published: March 12, 2025
Napoleon Adok Gai, the Director General of the National Communication Authority - Credit: Ministry of ICT and Postal Services
The National Communication Authority (NCA) has partnered with the African Advanced Level Telecommunications Institute (AFRALTI) to promote cross-border mobile technologies and establish a unified regional regulatory framework.
Engineer Napoleon Adok Gai, Director-General of the NCA, announced that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with the AFRALTI in Juba on Tuesday, March 11, following two years of negotiations.
This MoU automatically grants South Sudan membership in AFRALTI, allowing the country to benefit from specialized training and capacity-building initiatives for engineers and the broader telecommunications sector.
Engineer Adok explained that the agreement aims to strengthen the communication authority’s ability to manage emerging cross-border technologies, with the goal of establishing a unified regulatory approach across the region.
He highlighted that mobile money services like Kenya’s M-Pesa and Uganda’s Momo have expanded beyond their borders.
He stressed that cross-border innovations demand harmonized regulations across the region to ensure smooth integration.
Adok also affirmed that South Sudan is dedicated to strengthening its capacity to ensure the regulatory framework evolves alongside technological advancements in the industry.
“The National Communication Authority signed a Memorandum of Understanding with AFRALTI, which is an institute for training telecommunication engineers in the region,” Eng Adok said.
“This MOU will make us a member so that we can benefit from training, building capacity of our engineers in the country, and also of the telecom market,” he said.
“This MOU has been in negotiation for the last couple of years. We have seen that the emerging technologies are having tendencies to cut across the countries, and that requires some means and way to unify regulatory efforts.
“We’ve seen the spillover of innovation like mobile money. We have M-Pesa from East Africa coming here, Momo from Uganda, and we hope that M-GURUSH will also spread across other regions,” he said.
“Such cross-cutting services require that we should have the same understanding in what we are regulating in the industry with our counterpart in the region. As members of East Africa, of course, we endeavor to upgrade our capacity so that we are at the same level.”
