Tigo Business has signed a partnership agreement with GoDaddy Inc, a cloud platform dedicated to small and independent ventures, to offer GoDaddy online services to business customers in Africa, beginning with Rwanda.

According to information supplied, GoDaddy is a publicly traded company headquartered in the USA with nearly 17 million customers worldwide. It is described as "the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers and manage their work."

GoDaddy provides website creation, hosting and design, email marketing and other online productivity tools.

Under the agreement, eligible Tigo Rwanda Business customers on specific data plans will have access to a set of online tools including: domain name registration and corporate email, backed by GoDaddy's customer support offering.

Tom Craig, Chief Business Officer, Millicom Africa said: "We are proud to partner with GoDaddy in order to help businesses in Rwanda and across our footprint in Africa build a successful web presence, that will enable them to reach new customers and grow their income. We strongly believe in the power of the internet for all businesses, however online presence for SMEs is still quite limited within Africa today. Our partnership with GoDaddy is the latest example of Tigo Business' increasing support to small & medium enterprises to expand their businesses."

Tigo Rwanda is the first operation across Millicom Africa to offer GoDaddy services to its business customers.

"We are delighted to partner with Millicom in offering GoDaddy domain name and email online services to Tigo Business customers in Rwanda," said Stefano Maruzzi, GoDaddy Vice President of EMEA. "With our domain name registration and business email productivity solutions, businesses in Rwanda will now be able to more easily create and manage their venture's digital presence."

The country's President Paul Kagame has recently stated that he believes public-private partnerships are key to helping the continent meet the Broadband Commission target of providing at least 50% of its population with internet access by 2020.

"Access to technology and innovation must not distinguish between the rich and the poor or between urban and rural areas. If technology is entrenching divides rather than equalising opportunities then we are not harnessing it well and surely there will be negative consequences," said Kagame.