Indeed, they is without meaning unless there is a reference available to explain the term.
If you read the article you see that it is actually the kenyan government working to push the infrastructure further into the country, which is then appended with a question whether this will improve the connection for villages. The government is investing their money to further the infrastructure to improve connections for schools, a good thing, but apparently for a large part of the population that lacks even more basic things, notably electricity, there is no improvement.
So yes "they" (the kenyan government and probably the governments of South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Mozambique as well) should focus on some investments there as well.
It must be, especially because of the distance it carries data. The rate of transfer is impacted by that 17,000 km so much that this can hardly be the cable you would find in your common datacentre. Add to that 2 years of labour costs and all the resources needed to lay the cable.
A quote from wikipedia: "Because the effect of dispersion increases with the length of the fiber, a fiber transmission system is often characterized by its bandwidth-distance product, often expressed in units of MHzÃ--km. This value is a product of bandwidth and distance because there is a trade off between the bandwidth of the signal and the distance it can be carried. For example, a common multimode fiber with bandwidth-distance product of 500 MHzÃ--km could carry a 500 MHz signal for 1 km or a 1000 MHz signal for 0.5 km." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Bandwidth-distance_product
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.