{"id":10241,"date":"2026-05-01T14:50:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T14:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/?p=10241"},"modified":"2026-05-01T14:50:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T14:50:18","slug":"orange-cote-divoire-and-huawei-mark-10-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/orange-cote-divoire-and-huawei-mark-10-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire and Huawei Mark 10 Years of Running Africa’s Telecom Backbone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most infrastructure partnerships don’t make headlines when they’re working. The real test is whether the networks stay up, the data flows, and the calls connect quietly, reliably, at scale. That’s precisely what makes Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire’s <\/a>decision to publicly mark 10 years of its partnership with Huawei worth paying attention to. In a sector where the back-end rarely gets celebrated, the anniversary says something about how the relationship has held up and what it has quietly built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire marked the 10th anniversary of its Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) on April 28 in Abidjan. Launched in 2016 with support from Huawei, the GNOC operates from two sites in Abidjan and Dakar, and has become a central pillar in managing the group’s telecom infrastructure across Africa, overseeing networks in 12 subsidiaries and serving more than 100 million users. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The GNOC emerged from a major project on the transformation and modernization of Orange’s networks in Africa, bringing together core network activities and service platforms within a common supervision center designed to guarantee optimal network quality, a unique customer experience, and improved operational performance. In other words, it was never meant to be a single-country solution. From the start, the ambition was continental. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Designed to support the rapid growth of digital usage, the GNOC runs continuously and relies on advanced technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and automation to detect and resolve network issues. This setup has helped reduce response times and improve overall performance across voice, data, and mobile financial services. That last point matters more than it might seem mobile financial services across Francophone West Africa depend heavily on the same network infrastructure that underpins traditional voice and data, making uptime directly consequential for economic activity at the ground level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The human dimension of the GNOC is also notable. Since its launch, the center has created more than 270 skilled jobs, supporting the growth of expertise in areas such as automation and artificial intelligence. In a region where there is persistent pressure to develop local technical talent and persistent frustration about technology partnerships that import solutions without building capability that number carries genuine weight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Huawei, the GNOC represents one thread in a much longer relationship with Orange across the continent. More recently, the two companies have been deepening their collaboration on some of the harder infrastructure problems in African telecoms. At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, executives from both companies outlined a new AI Solar approach designed to tackle unreliable power infrastructure, harsh environmental conditions, and the high operating costs that have historically limited rural network expansion. The system combines solar power with AI-driven forecasting and energy management tools, and the results in C\u00f4te d’Ivoire specifically have been significant: Huawei says the approach has helped reduce outages by nearly 50% without requiring additional battery capacity, typically one of the most expensive components of remote site deployments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mamadou Coulibaly, Deputy CEO and COO of Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire, acknowledged that maintaining stable power remains one of the biggest operational challenges in rural deployments. “Our key challenge in rural locations is power consumption and keeping these sites working,” he said. “We have rolled out almost 1,200 sites in rural locations today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The operational context behind those numbers is worth understanding. Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire is not just a mobile operator, it is the market infrastructure for a substantial share of daily economic and financial life in the markets it serves. The Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire Group, present in C\u00f4te d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Liberia, closed the 2025 fiscal year with consolidated revenue of 1,197.1 billion CFA francs, up 10.4% year-on-year. That growth trajectory makes the reliability of the underlying network infrastructure a direct business variable, not just a technical concern. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Yasser Shaker, chief executive of Orange Africa and Middle East, the GNOC now plays a strategic role in the group’s operations by pooling expertise and strengthening service reliability. And looking ahead, Orange plans to further integrate artificial intelligence into its network operations to improve both system management and user experience, as the telecom sector evolves with the expansion of cloud services, AI, and digital platforms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Orange\u2013Huawei partnership exists in a broader geopolitical context that has become increasingly complicated. Huawei’s role in African telecoms infrastructure has drawn scrutiny from Western governments concerned about security risks in critical network infrastructure. Yet on the ground, across Francophone Africa in particular, the Chinese equipment maker remains deeply embedded in the networks that matter most and a decade of GNOC operations, 100 million users served, and 270 jobs created is the kind of track record that tends to outlast the policy debates happening elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire, the anniversary is less a celebration than a statement of continuity. The infrastructure works, the partnership has held, and the roadmap AI-integrated operations, rural connectivity expansion, deeper automation points forward rather than back. In a region where telecom reliability is still far from guaranteed, that consistency is itself a competitive asset.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most infrastructure partnerships don’t make headlines when they’re working. The real test is whether the networks stay up, the data flows, and the calls connect quietly, reliably, at scale. That’s precisely what makes Orange C\u00f4te d’Ivoire’s decision to publicly mark 10 years of its partnership with Huawei worth paying attention to. In a sector where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31579,"featured_media":10242,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[1810],"ppma_author":[452],"class_list":{"0":"post-10241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-telecom"},"authors":[{"term_id":452,"user_id":31579,"is_guest":0,"slug":"estherspeaks","display_name":"Esther Speaks","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/cdcaf0f94087bbfcad372d974a1a697382dc93112457104ff6535cf4984ea4de?s=96&d=mm&r=g","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10243,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions\/10243"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10241"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/villpress.com\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=10241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}