Accelerating Africa's Digital Growth

Last night, something unusual happened on Wall Street. When SpaceX announced it had locked in low-band 800 MHz spectrum for Starlink Mobile in the United States (official announcement), shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile dropped sharply, between 6 and 8 percent in after-hours trading. Investors suddenly realised that a satellite company with the ability to reach phones indoors, not just in open fields, could become a serious mobile player. For those of us watching Kenya’s d

The Layers of the AI Stack, and Why Africa Can Currently Only Participate in Four out of Five Two weeks ago, at the Global Africa Business Initiative Kenya watch party at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi, I gave a keynote on how Africa can build, own and shape Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than simply consume it. I borrowed Jensen Huang's picture of AI as a five-layer cake: energy at the bottom, then chips, then infrastructure, then models, and applications at the top. My a

Kenya's ICT Authority has opened bidding for KDEAP's national backbone and cross-border fibre frameworks. The idea is simple: the government puts in only as much subsidy as each route needs, and the private sector builds, owns and runs the network. It could change how Africa pays for middle-mile connectivity. I have read a lot of fibre tenders. Most of them follow the same script. The government designs a route, pays a contractor to build it, and then spends the next decade t

The case for Private Public Partnerships (PPPs) between telecoms operators and power utilities, and why getting this right will require governments, regulators, and development banks to work across boundaries they have historically kept very separate. This article was first published in telecoms review magazine I have spent much of the last decade staring at maps of Africa's infrastructure. Power maps. Fibremaps. Road maps. And I keep noticing the same thing. The high-voltage

By Ben Roberts April 2026 It would be very careless of Africa to keep pouring our Digital, and increasingly our Artificial Intelligence future into a handful of distant “cloud fortresses” while ignoring the clear warning signs flashing across the Middle East. Last month, Iranian Shahed-136 drones struck two AWS facilities in the UAE and damaged another in Bahrain. For the first time in history, hyperscale cloud infrastructure, the very backbone of modern banking, governmen

"By empowering Individuals with the necessary skills, we aim to drive growth and innovation across the African Continent"