China lists at least ten African uses for its BeiDou satellites, from precision farming to wildlife tracking. What the record does not yet list is the named centres to run them.
Section
Consumers
Twenty Digital Projects, RMB 360 Billion: FOCAC’s Next Frontier Pitch
At the 2024 Beijing summit China named the digital economy its next African frontier – 20 projects inside a three-year RMB 360 billion (US$50 billion) package. The detail is thinner than the headline.
200,000 Kilometres of Fibre: The Backbone Beneath the Africa-China Story
The headline China-Africa numbers are loans and ports. The quieter figure: 200,000km of optical fibre and broadband for six million households – infrastructure hard to see and hard to remove.
Press Centres and Production Links: China’s Quieter Media Play in Africa
The visible China-Africa media story is towers and dishes. The quieter one is people and programming – journalist exchanges, training cohorts and co-production deals that shape how stories get told.
Uganda by the Numbers: One Country Inside a 10,000-Village Promise
Continental pledges are hard to test. Uganda’s share of the satellite-TV rollout – 900 villages, 18,000 households – is small enough to count and large enough to judge the wider claim.
Satellite Dishes in the Bush: Where Rural Television Becomes Information Access
A solar-powered dish on a village clinic looks like entertainment. The pitch behind it is something else – basic access to news, weather and public information for places the grid never reached.
10,000 Villages: How a TV Pledge Became Africa’s Largest Media-Access Test
A decade after Xi Jinping pledged satellite TV for 10,000 African villages, nearly all are connected. The screens arrived; the harder questions are about who controls what they show.
The Desert Miracle: Moakanyi Magazine | Vol 06 Issue 01 | June 2026
Our June 2026 issue is out. How Duma Boko is re-architecting Botswana - from a diamond-dependent rentier state into a sovereign-equity economy built to rival the Gulf - and what that turn asks of everyone doing business here. Botswana is doing something most resource...
Brand safety
With the World Bank trimming global growth and warning of worse if conflict spreads, Botswana brands face a simple discipline: say less, and say it carefully.