Seychelles telecommunications boost

EIB supports international fibre-optic link. The European Investment Bank (EIB), the EU’s body for long-term lending, has recently announced an €8M loan to the Seychelles Cable Systems Company (SCS) for the first international submarine fibre-optic link with the African mainland. The cable will link the 115 island archipelago to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. This move will drastically improve both internet access and telecommunications capability in the Seychelles allowing for faster speeds of access and lower prices for subscribers, and is expected to be up and running by the second half of 2012. The move, according to the EIB, not only increases the technological capacity of the Seychelles, but will have consequent positive ramifications on its educational, business and healthcare potentialities. It will also provide an alternative to the satellite systems upon which the country is currently entirely dependent. The EU-Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund will provide a €4M grant to support the shareholding in the project. The project is estimated to cost €27M overall and will lay over 1,930 km of cable from the main island of Mahé to the existing Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System in Tanzania, another EIB-supported project. It is a project that, Plutarchos Sakellaris, EIB Vice President responsible for ACP lending operations says “demonstrates the EIBs commitment to supporting internet access essential for companies and communities in the 21st century”.