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Mara Corporation – a pan-African investment group with operations in technology, financial services and real estate – has launched its Maraphones, Mara X and Mara Z, manufactured at its first phone factory, which has opened in Rwanda. The phones, launched on Monday in Kigali, were designed in partnership with Google’s Android One Program.

In November 2018, Ashish Thakkar, Founder of Mara Group, said the company would roll out phones for sale in South Africa and Rwanda in 2019 after setting up factories with more than $100 million investment. According to Reuters, the plant in Kigali cost $24 million and could make 1,200 phones per day. The factory currently has over 200 employees.  
 
“This is the first smartphone manufacturer in Africa,” Thakkar told Reuters. “We are actually the first who are doing manufacturing. We are making the motherboards, we are making the sub-boards during the entire process. There are over 1,000 pieces per phone.”

Founded in 1996 as a small IT company in Uganda, Mara currently has its headquarters in Rwanda and employs over 14,000 people across some 26 African countries in sectors spanning technology, financial services and energy. The company said it is set to launch its next Maraphone factory in South Africa on the 17th of October.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, whose government is pushing to make the country a regional technology hub, said, “The smartphone is no longer a luxury item, it is rapidly becoming a requirement of everyday life.”  He said the government wants to enable many more Rwandans to use smartphones.

“The cost and quality is very important and the introduction of Mara Phones will put smartphone ownership within reach of more Rwandans,” Kagame added. The phones are expected to boost smartphone penetration in Rwanda currently at around 15 percent.

Thakkar also said last year that Maraphones would be affordable, high-end smartphones and they would run on the latest version of Android One, an optimised operating system for lite applications. The cost of Mara X and Mara Z in Rwanda is 175,750 Rwandan francs ($190) and 120,250 Rwandan francs ($130), respectively.

“When we first told people about Mara Phone, they told us we were crazy and that it wasn’t possible. Our true belief in Africa, particularly Rwanda, is a dream come true,” said Thakkar. “This is a historic moment which will help shift the narrative for Rwanda, Africa and the rest of the world.”

According to the GSM Association, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is projected to have 500 million cell phone subscribers by 2020. As of March 2017, up to 270 million people in the SSA access the internet via their mobile devices.