As the twenty-first century reaches its midpoint, digital sovereignty has emerged as a powerful symbol of national autonomy. Global powers are racing to embed their own cloud infrastructure, legislate data protection, and reduce reliance on foreign digital platforms. From the European Union with its GDPR-style frameworks to China’s sovereign cloud ecosystem, digital borders are reshaping international power dynamics. Against this global backdrop, African nations are awakening, increasingly vocal about the imperative to build and control their own internet infrastructure, seeking to craft digital boundaries that reflect political independence and economic ambition, rather than dependency.
Available data underscores the urgency of the moment. In 2024, approximately 5.52 billion people had access to the internet, which is about 68% of the global population. By the start of 2025, the number of internet users increased to 5.56 billion, representing 67.9% of the world’s population. This indicates a net increase of 136 million internet users during 2024. However, only 43 percent of the population had reliable electricity, an essential enabler of digital services.
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Meanwhile, broadband costs have been halved in the past five years, dropping from over 10 percent to around 5 percent of monthly GNI per capita, yet still far above the global average of under 3 percent. Africa currently accounts for less than 1 percent of global data centre capacity, while mobile data usage grows at roughly 40 percent annually, nearly twice the global rate. These figures expose a stark mismatch: soaring demand shadowed by a fragile physical and regulatory foundation.
Why It Matters
African digital sovereignty extends well beyond the symbolism of local servers. It encompasses economic control, regulatory oversight, and strategic resilience. In the absence of robust domestic infrastructure, much of the continent’s network traffic traverses foreign jurisdictions, exposing data to external laws and surveillance. Internet shutdowns in 2024 in nations such as Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan, illustrate how dependency on external transit infrastructure can be weaponised in moments of political turmoil, underlining the urgency of digital self-reliance. Therefore, constructing domestic data centres, national cloud systems, and coherent data policies is not an optional luxury but a strategic necessity.
Continental Infrastructure Unfolds
Under the vast digital horizon, African nations are weaving both fibre-optic cables and cloud structures in an effort to reclaim control. The International Finance Corporation’s historic $100 million injection into Raxio Group is a keystone. Targeting countries from Ethiopia to Mozambique, this funding enables regional Tier-3 data centre construction and forms the backbone of a sovereign digital future. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Abu Dhabi’s G42 have pledged $1 billion to build a geothermal-powered Azure cloud region in Kenya, anchoring East African cloud sovereignty in sustainable energy and local regulatory engagement.
On the connectivity front, submarine cables such as Google’s Equiano and Meta-backed 2Africa are stitching Africa into a new data fabric. Equiano alone spans 15,000 kilometres with landing points in Nigeria, Togo and South Africa, dramatically increasing international capacity. 2Africa promises 180 terabits per second of bandwidth across 33 countries and is expected to go live by late 2025. Complementing these are Africa-1 and PEACE cable systems, deepening intercontinental linkages and reinforcing digital resilience.
Domestically, over 409 million Africans live within 10 kilometres of terrestrial fibre networks. Yet broadband usage remains low due to affordability, quality gaps, and limited rural last-mile reach. A full continental build-out demands approximately $86 billion, with two-thirds of that expected to come from private sector funding.
Forging Sovereignty in the Soil of Nations
Senegal has quietly emerged as an exemplar in sovereignty architecture. Its national internet exchange point, Senix, ensures intra-country internet traffic remains on-shore, and a government-backed data centre platform supports secure local hosting for both public and private actors. This infrastructure strategy reduces latency, cost, and regulatory exposure.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the launch of DataConnect Africa in late 2024 marked a milestone. A partnership with Clever Cloud delivered a sovereign cloud platform for government and business users, certified under international standards such as ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS. This initiative is indicative of a shift towards interoperable regional cloud offerings housed within African borders.
Nigeria and Kenya illustrate how legal frameworks are nudging sovereignty into reality. Nigeria’s 2023 Data Protection Act requires local storage for specific categories of personal and financial data, encouraging enterprise to utilise local cloud platforms. Kenya’s Data Protection Act from 2019 underpins Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah but also reveals the fine balance between protectionism and welcoming foreign cloud providers in regulated partnerships.
South Africa’s Maziv deal is another pivotal development. In July 2025, Vodacom’s planned acquisition of about 30 percent of Maziv valued the fibre operator at upwards of $2 billion, reinforcing private investment in national fibre infrastructure, a critical artery for data flows across the continent.
Critical Analysis of the Sovereignty Quest
Despite encouraging progress, substantial challenges loom. Africa’s current data centre power capacity sits at approximately 250 megawatts; yet demand is projected to rise to 750 megawatts to support digital transformation, leaving a sizeable gap in power and infrastructure. With only 43 percent of Africans enjoying reliable electricity, many emerging centres rely on diesel generators, undermining cost-efficiency and environmental goals.
Talent scarcity further complicates sustainability. Although the digital economy is expanding, locally trained cloud, cybersecurity and data governance professionals remain in short supply. Brain drain continues to siphon expertise abroad, necessitating urgent investment in training institutions and certification frameworks.
Legal fragmentation is another nagging obstacle. While 36 nations have enacted data protection laws, only 16 had ratified the African Union’s Malabo Convention by mid-2023. Disparate implementation and policy non-alignment still hinder cross-border digital trade and regional cloud ecosystems.
Finally, the risk of replication without return persists. Without harmonised standards, some sovereign investments risk being redundant, isolated silos rather than parts of a coherent continental architecture.
The Atlas Blueprint
African sovereignty will take shape through a coordinated, multi-layered strategy. The African Union and regional blocs must champion a Pan-African data treaty, enabling cross-border cloud services and unified data governance. Infrastructure investment must be channelled into public-private partnerships that bolster local data centre capacity, fully utilising renewable energy such as geothermal and solar-powered sites.
Simultaneously, harmonised legislation, aligned with the Malabo Convention must be enacted across regional economic communities to streamline regulatory compliance and encourage innovation. The development of centres of excellence for cloud operations, cybersecurity and data analytics will nurture the human capital essential to sovereignty. Finally, a digital infrastructure investment fund, backed by both sovereign and international finance, could aggregate resources to catalyse continental-scale projects.
From Fragile Threads to Digital Armour
Africa’s journey toward digital borders is not an isolationist retreat but a thoughtful reclamation of agency in the digital era. From major investments in data centre hubs to sovereign cloud platforms in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, to fibre and cable networks knitting the continent together, the mosaic of sovereignty is taking shape. Yet realising the vision entails confronting energy fragility, talent gaps, policy divergence and scalability risks.
If African nations can forge these disparate threads into a continental framework of aligned infrastructure, regulation, skills and investment, they will have achieved not only sovereignty but a platform for leadership in the global digital economy. That journey demands ambition, coordination and perseverance, but its rewards could redefine independence in the digital age.
