Google in Africa

Kenya and Rwanda get Google Apps

By John Oates The Register

Google has done a deal to offer students in Kenya and Rwanda access to Google Apps – its online selection of products including Gmail.

Lecturers and students at Rwanda’s National University, the Kigali Institute for Education, and Kigali Institute for Science and Technology will all get access to Google’s online applications – Google Docs, calendar and spreadsheets. In Kenya some 50,000 students and staff at the University of Nairobi get a Gmail account.

Google is trying to sell its online apps package to small businesses for an annual per seat charge of $50. The company offers an education version of the package free to schools and colleges.

Google Apps does not support local languages like Swahili or Kinyarwanda.

The deals are Google’s first in sub-Saharan Africa although the company promised more to come in its blog entry.

Posted by Francoise Brougher, Business Operations Team Google Blog

Tens of thousands of university students in Rwanda and Kenya are now on their way to using Google Apps. As a result of two separate partnerships that we’ve signed today with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network, nearly 20,000 students from the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology, plus 50,000 more from Kenya’s University of Nairobi, are joining their colleagues at Northwestern, ASU and around the world with access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets under their university’s domain for free.

Offering Google Apps in Africa means more to us than connecting students and teachers to conduct that special exchange of ideas, innovation and creativity so unique to universities (we should know). In Africa and in the developing world, it also means doing our part to make sure that everyone has access to the same services wherever they live, whatever their language, and regardless of income.

We can’t be more delighted about our Google Apps partnerships with Rwanda and Kenya, and there are more to come.