Mobile operator Orange Burkina Faso is reportedly unable to access almost 15% of its telecom sites due to the security situation in those areas as fighting between the military government and Islamist armed groups continues.
According to a report on Friday from the Ecofin news agency, Jérôme Hénique, executive director of Orange Africa and the Middle East (OMEA), told French public radio RFI that the telco’s technical teams can no longer go to such sites to carry out essential maintenance, which in turn is impacting service quality.
“There is strong insecurity [in] red zones that prevent us from operating in a part of the country,” Hénique told RFI, saying the telco would not risk the lives of its employees to carry out maintenance or repairs at telecoms sites in such areas.
According to Human Rights Watch, government forces have been fighting insurgencies by the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen, JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) since they entered Burkina Faso via Mali in 2016.
Since then, both groups have attacked government security forces, civilians and even each other. According to provisional figures from US-based non-profit group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), over 20,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, many of them civilians.
In late August, Burkina Faso’s Minister of Digital Transition, Post and Electronic Communications, Aminata Zerbo-Sabane, told local state broadcaster Radiodiffusion-Télévision du Burkina (RTB) that vandalism or destruction of telecoms infrastructure committed by terrorists in several areas of the country had reduced coverage of mobile telephony and Internet services by 10% to 20%.
She also said the government had committed to invest XOF3 billion (US$5 million) to restore telecoms infrastructure in those areas, according to a separate Ecofin report.
A recent report from the Electronic Communications and Postal Regulatory Authority (ARCEP) said that 681 telecoms sites in Burkina Faso were inaccessible or out of service (or both) as of August 2023, compared to 632 the previous year.
Nevertheless, Zerbo-Sabane said last month that Burkina Faso plans to extend mobile and internet services to 1,000 remote areas without access to telephony and internet services over the next three years.
ARCEP figures also show that mobile service coverage in Burkina Faso stands at 85%, while 3G internet covers 64% of the country, and 4G internet covers 46%.
