The Following countries attended the workshop: The Gambia, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cape Verde, and Guinee Bissau.

This meeting has started the cycle of workshop that the UIT/BDT has committed itself to organise upon the request of the Tariff Group for Africa (TAF) after the adoption of its cost model on March 9, 2000 in Nairobi (Kenya).

Objectives

Outcome

Those of the concerned countries who are more familiar with the ITU works on costs and tariffs (Gamtel, Ghana Telecom, Cap Verde) collected the main data before the meeting.

The other countries (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinee Bisau) didn’t have enough data due to either internal information flow or late assignment.

All the participants at the end of the workshop, gained a very high level of awareness as regards the importance of the role that the TAF model could play in the long term financial viability of their telephone business.

The countries with insufficient data operated the TAF Model based evaluation software, using the data of other countries, collected printouts of the forms (of both data entries and results editions), in order to increase the awareness of their local partners once back home and reorganise the data collection activity, with a view to prepare their administration to the use of the TAF model when the final software is available.

The countries with sufficient data obtained very valuable results that can be summarised as follows:

1. All of them confirmed that the domestic communications were subsidised by international communications, but the degree of subsidisation was different;
2. One of them showed a very significant access deficit on the price of the urban communications while the interurban communications were balanced. The model confirmed how that administration was losing money on the international incoming communications because of too low settlement rate, and was realising money on the international outgoing communications;
3. Another one confirmed reasonable access deficit on both urban and interurban communications, was close to reflect its costs (including access deficit reallocation) on international incoming and outgoing communications prices, but need to re-evaluate its sub-regional tariff policy;
4. Another one found that its tariffs were almost rebalanced but also need to re-evaluate its sub-regional tariff policy.

The administrations calculated their fully rebalanced tariffs, both as long term target tariffs and as information for national inbound interconnection negotiation.

They recognised this workshop as the most important event they have ever attended concerning cost issue.

Way forward

The participants decided to request Gamtel (The Gambia) to send a letter, on their behalf, to the Vice-Chairperson of the TAF Group, in order to urge her to call upon organisations like ATU, InfoDev (The World Bank), the ADB and the BDT, for them to co-operate in order to acquire and distribute, to the TAF members, the final version of the cost model software.

The participants also asked the Director of the BDT to host and administer the TAF server and continue to organise such practical workshops as decided in Nairobi on March 9, 2000.

The BDT reaffirmed its commitment and informed the meeting that the server hosting process was underway.

Conclusion

The participants expressed their thanks to the Director of the BDT for the substantial support he has been giving to the developing countries, especially those in Africa in order to sustain their smooth adaptation to the new telecommunication environment.