Regulation

SADC members plan to harmonise mobile roaming tariffs

SADC members plan to harmonise mobile roaming tariffs

The Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority (BOCRA) has announced that Botswana and five other Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states have collaborated to substantially reduce and harmonise mobile roaming tariffs in line with the One Network Area (ONA) framework.

ONA seeks to harmonise roaming tariffs to ensure cost-reflective pricing and create a seamless communications environment across participating countries.

Botswana implemented the ONA framework jointly with Malawi, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The ONA initiative is aligned to efforts by SADC member states to reduce and harmonise roaming charges across the region and is intended to be progressively expanded to include other member states.

BOCRA says that the participating member states drew inspiration from Botswana and Namibia which were the first within SADC to successfully implement reduced and harmonised roaming rates in August 2024.

The initiative places emphasis on the reduction of data prices, given, as BOCRA puts it, the vital role played by data services in the digital transformation of any economy. Price reductions by operators range between 10% and 98.6% for data, voice and SMS, though details of participating operators and timings are still not clear.

This ONA has a precedent in the form of the East African Community (EAC) One Network Area (ONA), a regional initiative that harmonises calling and data tariffs to reduce roaming costs across Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. Initiated in 2014-2015 to facilitate trade, it allows users to pay local rates for voice calls, SMS, and data, with caps on roaming charges.

However, as an article earlier this year in Tanzania’s Business Insider news service notes, inconsistencies in implementation, regulation and network readiness mean the ONA experience still varies significantly from one partner state to another.



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