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 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

This analysis examines IPv4 address allocation per capita across 56 African countries using data from AfriNIC (African Network Information Centre) resource allocation statistics for 2025. The findings reveal a stark digital divide, with allocation rates varying by a factor of nearly 60,000 between the best and worst-served nations. The Four-Tier Digital Landscape Outliers: Islands of Digital Abundance Seychelles and Mauritius stand dramatically apart from the continental patt

It would be very careless of Kenya to abandon its digital superhighway initiative and allow marginalised counties to be fully served by fore