Tanzania Answers To Konza Technology City With “Raphta City”

In February, we reported that Konza Technology City’s funding was approved by the Kenyan government. Now Tanzanians don’t want to be left behind. The Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), SEACOM and a group of local and international investors are formalizing a public-private partnership (PPP) agreement to jointly develop an ICT park in Dar es Salaam.

The park will be named Raphta City will help in facilitating innovation while creating quality jobs and modernizing the region’s ICT landscape.

COSTECH Director General, Dr Hassan Mshinda, claims that the park will be the first ‘smart village’ geographic cluster of its kind in East Africa and completely ignoring the fact that Kenya is developing such a village. Anyway, we are really waiting for who will be the first to develope the ICT Park.

Raphta City will be enabled by high speed broadband access and high end ICT infrastructure. The group say that the the name Rhapta City comes from an ancient trading centre believed to have been located where Dar es Salaam stands today. The ground breaking is expected in mid-2011. The park will host ICT small and medium enterprises (SMEs), established multinationals, IT services, business process outsourcing (BPO) call centres, online education, community public space, and an incubation centre for innovation hosted by COSTECH according to the statement.