Seventy percent of Africa's population lives in rural areas with limited access to broadband service. The three-day CTO forum, in Freetown, focused on issues such as how to spur Internet and broadband use in rural areas, the critical role of the Universal Service Funds and regulatory tools for stimulating rural supply and demand. The forum also looked at ways to measure and understand the socioeconomic impact of rural ICT development.

The forum was set up to allow African-based companies to "gain insight through experience-sharing with overseas experts" and to "closely examine how people in the rural area connect themselves with towns and cities through affordable and efficient means," according to Sierra Leone's National Telecommunications Commission Director of Legal and Licensing Affairs Michalea Mackay, who chaired the opening ceremony.

Technological advancement is not reducing inequality and the difference between countries that have implemented technology infrastructure and those who haven't is getting bigger, according to the CTO's CEO, Tim Unwin. "That is why we are here," Unwin said. "To learn from your examples. We all have challenges. And we all have innovative ways of addressing these challenges."

On the local front, operators in Sierra Leone discussed their business responses to policy imperatives, noting major challenges facing their effort to reach out to rural areas and how they plan to tackle them. While the four panelists cited electricity as a major challenge to their operations, an Airtel official, Gerald Cole, cited high taxes by the government. He said that since every 10 percent increase in telecom penetration results in a 1 percent increase in GDP, it would not be a loss for the government to consider tax optimization.

Meanwhile, Adel Taher, the head of MDIC, the management company that recently took over the operations of Sierratel, insisted that the liberalization of international gateways has not reduced the high cost of international connections.