Chinafrica keeps reminding you: Africa knows how to innovate.

This time, the continent demonstrates it through the company Mara Phone. In October 2019, the Rwanda-based company, launched its small revolution in the ultra-competitive mobile phone market: the first smartphone "made in Africa."

With its two models, Mara X and Mara Z, sold respectively at $130 and $190, the brand aims to conquer the Rwandan market, where only 15 percent of the population has a smartphone. The firm relies on the African label and the quality in front of a competition whose first models are accessible around $80. British-Ugandan Ashish Thakkar, President of multi-sector company Mara Group, says Africans are willing to pay a bit more to buy "made in Africa" ​​quality smartphones.

Although companies manufacture smartphones in Algeria, South Africa, Egypt or Ethiopia, their parts are usually from China and are only assembled on the continent. "We are the first smartphone manufacturer in Africa. We manufacture motherboards, we master the whole process. There are more than 1,000 parts per phone," asserted Thakkar. To manufacture them, Mara Phone aims to build a mobile phone assembly plant in each of the five sub-regions of Africa, with deploying in Rwanda for East Africa and South Africa for Southern Africa having been completed.

"The smartphone is no longer a luxury item, it has quickly become a requirement of everyday life," expressed Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the inauguration of the plant in Kigali, Rwanda. According to Thakkar, high-quality, affordable smartphones are important because they can have an impact on the continent. "Quality smartphones mean we can really enable financial inclusion, microcredit and micro insurance. This can lead to better education, digital health care and the efficiency of agriculture and improved trade. Before today, we had quality smartphones, but they were not affordable. And if they were, then the quality was no longer there," he asserted.

So far, the company has exported to 41 countries, the top five retail countries being Germany, the UK, the United States, Italy and Switzerland, making Mara Phone a player in the global smartphone market. Thakkar claimed that the company's fast export base portrays product quality, although it is a small player in the market. "It shows that quality is absolutely there. We are obviously a much smaller company than the big global players at the moment. But we are above our objectives, and we are confident that our continent will provide all its support."

Founded in 1996, Mara Group, Mara Phone's parent company, operates in the fields of technology, banking, real estate and infrastructure. Through telephones, the company not only wants to diversify its income, but also create jobs. "It will really be a transformation. This will create thousands of jobs directly and possibly hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs in the continent's ecosystem," said the group's president.

(Comments to christophe.alexandre@chinafrica.cn)

The two devices of Mara phone run Android 9.0 Pie including two years of updates. They are dual SIMs or SIM + TF card, which means that the storage space is expandable by micro SD card. They have a HD+ screen (720 x 1.440 pixels), a fingerprint reader on the back and a photo module on the back of 13 megapixels. Here's what sets them apart:

The Mara X, with a lightweight version of Android Go, features a 5.5-inch display that hides a four-core 1.5GHz Mediatek MT6739 SoC. It has a gigabyte of RAM, 16 GB of storage and a front camera of 5 megapixels. This model is equipped with a removable battery of 3500 mAh.

The Mara Z, which runs under Android One, has a 5.7-inch screen and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 processor, with eight cores running at 1.4 GHz. It offers 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. The selfie camera is 13 megapixels and the battery, non-removable, delivers 3,075 mAh.