East Africa Proposes Lower Mobile Roaming Rates, but Regulatory Hurdles Persist
November 5th 2026
- The EAC is considering new price caps to make cross-border mobile calls and data cheaper.
- Proposed rules would cut the maximum retail roaming call rate from 10 to 5.9 cents per minute.
- Twelve years after its launch, the One Network Area initiative remains incomplete across the region.
The East African Community (EAC) is preparing new rules to further reduce mobile roaming charges across the region, although regulatory, commercial, and technical challenges continue to hinder their implementation. Twelve years after the launch of the regional One Network Area (ONA) initiative, the system remains only partially operational, limiting its effectiveness in making cross-border mobile communications more affordable.
The proposed reforms were reviewed on Tuesday, November 3, at a follow-up meeting organized by the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) in Nairobi, Kenya, according to the Kenya News Agency (KNA). Discussions focused on progress made so far, the challenges faced by telecom operators, and proposed regulatory changes.
Lower Price Caps for Calls and Mobile Data
The draft regulations propose lower price caps for roaming services across the region. For voice calls, the maximum retail rate would fall from 10 US cents to 5.9 cents per minute, while the wholesale rate charged between operators would drop from 7 cents to 4.25 cents per minute. The rules would also require per-second billing, with no call setup fees.
Mobile data would also be covered by the new pricing framework. The proposed wholesale rate is $1.65 per gigabyte (GB), compared with a retail cap of $2.72 per GB. For text messages, the proposed wholesale and retail caps are 1.5 cents and 2.7 cents per message, respectively. The changes are intended to update the ONA’s pricing framework, which initially focused on voice calls and text messages. They reflect the growth of mobile internet use and the increasing importance of data services in cross-border communications.
Persistent Challenges to Implementation
The ONA initiative has yet to be fully implemented across East Africa. According to KNA, six of the EAC’s eight member states have adopted the system: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Somalia have not yet joined but have committed to aligning their regulations with the regional framework.
In its work on regional roaming, the EAC Secretariat has identified several obstacles to consistent implementation. These include differences in national regulations and tax systems, uneven oversight of roaming rates, and network interconnection costs. The organization also points to imbalances in traffic volumes between operators, permanent roaming, and fraudulent practices such as SIM boxing, which allows users to bypass charges on international calls.
These challenges were also discussed at the November 3 meeting in Nairobi. Anthony Kamwaro, head of regulatory affairs and public policy at Safaricom, highlighted high international call termination charges and the use of intermediary operators to route certain calls. He also raised concerns about foreign exchange losses on roaming settlements, which are often made in US dollars even though operators collect revenue in local currencies.
Eric Ouko, a representative of Jamii Telecommunications Limited (JTL), pointed to difficulties in connecting networks that use different generations of mobile technology. He also discussed the limits of monitoring communications through internet-based applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, whose calls are not recorded by operators as conventional voice traffic.
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