The Cameroonian has been elected at the 74th meeting of the Board of Directors of the African Regional Satellite Communications Organization (Rascom), held from May 22 to 24 in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
Created on May 27, 1992 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Rascom is a pan-African intergovernmental organization made up of 45 countries, whose mission is to build and operate an earth-orbiting satellite system to provide point-to-multipoint telecommunications services across the continent. The organization is headquartered in Abidjan.
CAMTEL’s first female CEO
Since December 14, 2018, Judith Yah Sunday,59, has been Managing Director of Cameroon Telecommunications (CAMTEL), Cameroon’s state-owned telecommunications company. She is the first woman to hold this position within the company, which manages the 12,000-kilometer national fiber optic backbone, to which an additional 4,000 kilometers will soon be added. This backbone links Cameroon’s 10 regions and also connects the country to three African countries: Nigeria, Chad and the Central African Republic.
Camtel also manages the four landing points of the five fiber optic submarine cables installed in Cameroon, enabling the country to be connected to the whole world. This fiber optic infrastructure is made available to all operators and various other organizations. In addition, since March 2020, Camtel has held three operating licenses: fixed telephony, mobile telephony and transport.
Over 30 years’ experience in telecommunications
Judith Yah Sunday holds a doctorate from the University of Yaoundé 2, a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada), obtained in 1991, and a postgraduate diploma (DESS) in banking and international finance from the Institute of International Relations of Cameroon (IRIC) in Yaoundé. She has over 30 years’ experience in the telecommunications sector. She joined Camtel in 1994, when it was still known as Intelcam (Société des télécommunications internationales du Cameroun). Camtel was born of the merger of two structures: the former Telecommunications Department of the Cameroon Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, and the former Intelcam. The company was officially created on September 8, 1998. Since then, Camtel has been responsible for cellular telephony, national wireline telephony and international telecommunications.
At the state-owned company, Judith Yah Sunday has held a number of positions, including marketing director for the northwest and regional director for the northwest, coast and center.
Sub-regional positions
In December 2021, Judith Yah Sunday was the first person to be elected President of the newly-created Association of Central African Telecom Operators, at the end of the Constitutive General Assembly held in Yaoundé from December 15 to 16, 2021. The association is made up of the incumbent telecoms operators of Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Congo, Gabon, Chad, Burundi and the Central African Republic.
In addition, from 2013 to 2017, Judith Yah Sunday was Secretary General of the Governance Council of the African Federation of Internal Audit Institutes (AFIIA), based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
