Over the past four years, Cameroon, Gabon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo, and Equatorial Guinea have collaborated on a project designed to enable seamless communication for their citizens traveling within the region, eliminating the need to change SIM cards. This initiative seeks to foster greater sub-regional integration.

Central African citizens could soon communicate freely across borders without incurring extra charges, as regional telecommunications ministers have issued a three-month deadline to finalize a free roaming project.

The decision followed a meeting of Telecommunications Ministers of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) held last week in Bangui, Central African Republic. During the meeting, participants discussed obstacles hindering the initiative, which seeks to eliminate disparities in roaming costs that lead to expensive communications and impede the telecommunications sector's development.

In November 2021, CEMAC countries signed bilateral agreements to implement free roaming. However, the project has faced substantial delays. In April 2024, the Assembly of Telecommunications Regulators of Central Africa (ARTAC) reported that only two of the 213 planned interconnections had been established. These connections involved MTN Cameroon and MTN Congo, and Airtel Gabon and Orange Cameroon.

While the specific obstacles to free roaming were not disclosed, ARTAC's objectives for a 2024 seminar aimed at accelerating the process shed light on potential issues. These include delays in finalizing minutes, including tariff agreements between regulators, late signing of interconnection and roaming contracts, potential technical and legal difficulties for the involved parties, issues related to the separation of roaming and traditional international traffic on direct interconnection links, and the selection of technology for those links.

By Isaac K. Kassouwi,

Editing by Sèna D. B. de Sodji