Beyond Connectivity: The Engineer Training Africa’s Next Generation of Telecom Teams

By Ugo Aliogo

In this edition, BusinessDay looks at a series of network projects that are changing how people connect across West and Central Africa. Behind them is a specialist delivery team from Nokia Solutions and Networks, responsible for turning investment plans into working infrastructure. One of the engineers at the centre of this work is Eunice Kamau, a network management and optimisation engineer whose projects span dense cities and difficult regional corridors in Nigeria and Cameroon.

By 2013, Kamau had already worked on large 2G and 3G programmes for major Tier 1 operators in East, Central, Southern and West Africa. She contributed to coverage and capacity projects that supported nationwide mobile services, from crowded capitals to rural highways. Her assignments also took her into 4G test sites and lab environments in Kenya and South Africa, where early LTE trials were used to study performance, handover behaviour and backhaul requirements before wider commercial launch. The combination of pan African field work and early 4G experience gave her a practical view of how modern networks behave when traffic grows and services become more data heavy.

In Nigeria and Cameroon, her work focuses on multi layer GSM and WCDMA networks that must support both traditional voice and rising data usage. The projects cover capital cities and regional hubs, including Lagos, Abuja, Douala and Yaoundé, where subscriber numbers are high and expectations for service quality are increasing. The task is not to build small demonstration clusters. It is to plan and refine wide area infrastructure that can carry sustained traffic across business districts, crowded residential areas, industrial zones and key transport routes.

Kamau’s role runs from the radio access network to the transport layer that links base stations to the core. On the radio side, she works on site grids, sector layouts and parameter plans that determine how signals overlap, how interference is controlled and how subscribers move between 2G and 3G layers. On the transport side, she works closely with microwave and fibre planners so that each site’s radio capacity is matched by stable and sufficient backhaul. In her planning files for Nigerian and Cameroonian clusters, radio and transport are treated as parts of one system. A new site or carrier is considered successful only if it improves end to end performance, not just the colour of a coverage map.

Traffic growth sits at the centre of these designs. Both countries are seeing strong increases in voice minutes and even sharper rises in data, driven by wider smartphone use and the spread of messaging, social media and media services. Kamau’s work starts from realistic demand profiles, not averages. She studies where traffic concentrates at different times of day, from commercial areas during office hours to shopping streets and residential estates in the evening, and uses these patterns to decide where cells must be strengthened, where carriers should be added and where extra 3G capacity is needed to protect older 2G layers from overload. Each cluster is drawn with a clear path for future upgrades so that capacity can be added in a planned sequence rather than as a series of emergency fixes.

Her designs do not ignore conditions on the ground. In both Nigeria and Cameroon, power supply, site access and terrain all influence what can be built and how reliably it can be operated. Many sites depend on a mix of grid power, diesel and batteries. Fuel deliveries, maintenance cycles and security risks affect how long base stations can run at full capacity. Urban density, informal building patterns and road conditions influence where towers, poles and rooftop sites can realistically be placed. Microwave line of sight is not always straightforward, and sometimes the most attractive position in a planning tool is not practical in the field. Kamau works within these constraints, favouring solutions that can be built, powered and maintained under local conditions over designs that look perfect in simulations but are fragile in real life.

A constant feature of her assignments is close work within country engineering teams. In every market where she has worked, she has been responsible not only for delivering plans and optimisation actions but also for training and mentoring local engineers on network operations. In Nigeria and Cameroon this includes detailed reviews of cluster designs with radio teams, joint analysis of live performance indicators and systematic follow up on drive test results. Sessions are structured to explain how to read counters, how to link symptoms in the field to specific parameters and how to plan changes in a controlled way. Younger engineers are introduced to practical methods for neighbour planning, interference control, traffic balancing and the interaction between radio and transport layers. In many of these technical war room settings she has been the only woman present, and colleagues have come to describe her, half in admiration and half in humour, as “the iron lady” for her persistence during long troubleshooting sessions. Similar training responsibilities have been part of her work in projects for Tier 1 operators across East, Central and Southern Africa, where she has helped build local capability as networks expanded.

The result is a body of work that combines technical delivery with steady capacity building. Networks in Nigeria and Cameroon that draw on her planning and optimisation now carry growing volumes of voice and data while keeping clear options for further expansion. As operators move toward wider mobile broadband deployment, these foundations will determine how easily new technologies can be added and how reliably they perform when they arrive.

The story of connectivity in West and Central Africa is often told through licence awards, subscriber counts and tariffs. The work of engineers such as Eunice Kamau shows another side. It is the patient effort of designing clusters, tuning parameters, aligning radio and transport, and training local teams so that networks stay stable as demand rises. Quietly, and mostly out of public view, that work is helping to close the region’s connectivity gap one city, one corridor and one cluster at a time.