Vodacom, with a market value of R208 billion on the JSE, operates as a purpose-driven African connectivity, digital, and FinTech provider, alongside Safaricom.
With a customer base of 185.8 million spanning consumer and enterprise sectors, Vodacom, owned by the UK-based Vodafone, oversees several companies that may surprise you.
Vodacom’s “tech for good” platforms help diversify its revenues and drive societal benefit.
The company actively contribute to creating a digital society by developing solutions across critical verticals, including agriculture, education and healthcare.
Mezzanine, a Vodacom subsidiary, is a key enabler of its “tech for good” solutions in these industries, partnering with the Vodafone-owned company and external companies to deliver its platform-as-a-service (Paas) and software-as-a-service (Saas) solutions.
Mezzanine is an African tech start-up with the support and scale offered by Vodacom and Vodafone aimed at creating productive societies across Africa.
Their healthcare platform HealthX (previously called mVacciNation) has supported the South African Government’s national COVID-19 vaccination programme. During the year, 38.8 million vaccination events have been supported, with over 22.7 million individuals vaccinated.
Mezzanine, is scaling smart agriculture platforms. Connected Farmer is a digital platform that improves productivity, revenue and resilience for small-scale farmers by connecting them to information, inputs, credit and buyers at scale. More than 5 million farmers use the agriculture platform in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia (2022: 1.4 million).
In addition, MyFarmWeb supports commercial farms which adopt precision agriculture practices, leveraging IoT to enhance data-driven decision-making.
Mezzanine supported the South African Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development and the Solidarity Fund to disburse subsidies to smallholder farmers through e-Vouchering. The e-Voucher mobile and web-based solution enabled cashless value distribution to these farmers, who redeemed vouchers worth more than R9 million in 2023.
In Tanzania, Mezzanine is accelerating the rollout of M-Kulima, our easy-to-use system for agriculture that enables communication and transactions between companies, the government and farmers. Currently 3.2 million farmers have registered on the platform through which they will receive access to loans and insurance advisory services.
Vodacom is partnering with Eskom to source electricity from independent renewable power producers. The programme is underpinned by an innovative virtual wheeling platform developed by Mezzanine, a Vodacom subsidiary. This will contribute renewable power to the national grid, closely matching our energy consumption profile, to offset our emissions from electricity.
“Our virtual wheeling solution presents an opportunity for companies with a similar distributed nature of operations to follow suit. Through this initiative, we believe the private sector can help solve South Africa’s energy crisis,” says Vodacom.
IoT.nxt, a Vodacom subsidiary, is a global IoT company offering a dynamic application enablement platform comprising of software, middleware, hardware and analytics services. Our solutions have been implemented globally in 11 verticals.
As part of the Vodafone family, IoT.nxt continues to pioneer industrial enterprise-level applications and advanced solutions that are powered by the IoT, digital twins, and machine learning.
Last year, IoT.nxt partnered with Vantage Towers, a provider of passive wireless infrastructure (towers, masts, rooftop sites, distributed antenna systems (DAS) and Small Cells), to drive digital transformation in the wireless telecommunications industry.
The two companies are working together to deploy a secure, digital solution for remote management of sensors, passive equipment and alarms on site, which leverages the power of IoT.nxt’s tried and tested technology to streamline processes and reduce manual interventions, resulting in improved efficiency, reduced downtime, and lower maintenance costs.
In the initial phase, more than 700 sites have been deployed up to now in three countries, namely Spain, Ireland and Portugal. The deployment will soon be extended to other markets.
This partnership is part of Vantage Towers’ strategy to become a fully digital TowerCo, setting a new standard in the industry by offering a more modern and technologically advanced approach to managing and operating telecommunication towers. IoT.nxt’s proven solution capabilities are helping Vantage Towers to achieve this strategy, while also solving current operational needs and allowing them to quickly add new features in the future.
3. Vodacom’s operations
