Africa's power grid is already a fibre network. We just haven't unlocked it yet.

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 transmission towers run along the same corridors a telecoms engineer would choose. The distribution poles reach the same villages where ISPs would string their last-mile cables if the economics worked. Power and data are, in almost every meaningful sense, the same network. One carries electrons, the other photons. For the most part they have been built, owned, and financed by people who operate in separate worlds. That is the single biggest unforced error in African connectivity. It is also the easiest one to fix.

So, what exactly are we talking about?

Let me explain the technology briefly, because the acronyms matter. Optical Ground Wire, OPGW, is a cable that serves a dual purpose. It runs along the top of high-voltage transmission towers as an earth wire, protecting the line from lightning. But wound inside its aluminium-clad steel armour are optical fibres, giving you a long-distance, weather-hardened backbone running exactly where you need it most: between substations, between cities, along the spine of a country's energy grid.

All-Dielectric Self-Supporting cable, ADSS, does something similar but lower down the network hierarchy. It hangs on the medium and low-voltage distribution poles that carry power to homes and businesses. No metal at all, which means it can be strung alongside live electricity infrastructure without risk.

Together, OPGW and ADSS mean that the national electricity grid is, functionally, a national fibre backbone and last-mile network waiting to be commercialised. In Kenya alone, the electricity distribution company i.e. KPLC's medium and low voltage distribution network connects 10 million homes, schools and businesses to the grid, yet 90% of those properties have no fixed broadband connection at all. The poles are already there. The rights of way exist. The maintenance crews are already on the road. Nobody has strung the fibre.

How much capacity is already installed, and quietly going nowhere?

Across the continent, national transmission companies have deployed OPGW across their high-voltage networks. The fibre exists. It is lit in places, dark in others, and a large share of routes sits commercially unused, not for lack of demand, but because there is no mechanism to sell it.

These are electricity transmission companies. Their mandate is to move power, not to run a wholesale broadband business. Where they do sell capacity, it is typically dark fibre to Tier 1 operators, which leaves smaller ISPs, regional providers, and community networks locked out. No interconnection points, no standardised wholesale products, no open-access framework. Just kilometers of glass fibre, quietly doing nothing, multiplied across East, West, and Southern Africa.

Why has this not been solved already?

Part of the answer is the governance gap between energy and telecoms: different ministries, different regulators, different mandates, different definitions of success. A power utility's core incentive is to protect its infrastructure, not maximise its commercial use. Opening up OPGW to third parties requires wayleave agreements, safety protocols, maintenance SLAs, and revenue-sharing arrangements that do not feature in a utility's operating manual.

The development banks that would typically finance the solution mirror those same divisions. ICT teams fund fibre projects with ICT ministries; energy teams fund transmission and distribution with energy ministries. OPGW and ADSS sit precisely at the boundary. Most high-voltage power projects include OPGW but leave out the minimal extra cost to make the fibre commercially accessible; most last-mile electrification projects leave ADSS out altogether, leaving newly electrified homes unconnected to broadband. The specialisation that creates these silos also creates expertise, but working across it is part of the solution.

What does it look like when those boundaries are crossed?

AFD, the Agence Française de Développement, is thinking differently. Six million people. 2,500 health facilities. Nine universities. That is what went offline in Ethiopia when conflict in Tigray and North Amhara damaged 1,000 kilometers of OPGW. EEP, the power utility, went to AFD with a single ask covering electricity and fibre together. AFD funded it that way: a grant to rehabilitate 500 kilometers of OPGW, with EEP as implementing partner and connectivity to hospitals and universities as the explicit development objective. Energy asset, digital outcome, one project.

What AFD has worked out is straightforward: look at the physical asset for what it does, not for which ministry owns it, and the financing unlocks. Other DFIs can do the same. The model exists, it works, and it can be replicated.

What does a good PPP model actually look like?

The commercial models that work share a common logic: separate ownership of the passive infrastructure from operation of the active services and put a neutral wholesale layer in between.

The utility owns the infrastructure and keeps a share of fibre cores for SCADA, grid management, and operational communications. A rule of thumb: reserve 30 percent for utility operations, release the other 70 percent commercially.

A neutral infrastructure operator runs the commercial layer. It establishes open-access points of presence along the OPGW corridor and across the ADSS network, publishes standardised wholesale tariffs, onboards ISPs on equal terms, and does not compete with them. That structural separation is what earns the trust of smaller operators.

Revenue runs on two tracks. Wholesale access from ISPs, mobile operators, and enterprise users. Institutional contracts with schools, clinics, and government offices provide anchor demand from day one, turning a speculative investment into a financeable one.

This is not theoretical. Liquid Intelligent Technologies pioneered utility-fibre PPPs in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Kenya. C Squared has done the same in Ghana. Phase 3 Telecom has built its national backbone on the Nigerian transmission grid. The PPP model has operators behind it.

The economics follow the same logic. ADSS on existing poles costs 30 to 50 percent less than trenching, and institutional anchor demand delivers revenue from day one, enough to bring in development finance on concessional terms and commercial capital behind it. The blended model is a de-risking mechanism, not a permanent subsidy.

What needs to happen for this to scale?

Three things, none of them primarily technical.

Government. Energy and ICT ministries need to treat the physical infrastructure as national digital infrastructure regardless of which ministry technically owns it. An inter-ministerial MoU is the legal instrument. Political will is the precondition.

Regulator. A power utility will not voluntarily become a neutral wholesale host. It needs a mandate, a commercial framework that makes its economics visible, and assurance that its operational fibre cores are protected. Telecoms regulators need to extend their thinking beyond licensed spectrum into the physical infrastructure layer.

Finance. AFD has shown cross-sector project structures can work. Other DFIs should ask whether their internal structures make joint appraisal easy or hard. The infrastructure does not respect the organisational chart. The financing needs to follow the infrastructure.

One more thing, about who this is really for?

Consider Kenya.

Between 2013 and 2016, REREC, backed by the World Bank, connected 94 percent of Kenya's public primary schools to power. A genuine achievement. A decade on, UNICEF Kenya puts only 30 percent of those same schools online.

In the intervening years, millions of children have passed through those classrooms. They got the light switch. They did not get connectivity, and its associated access to information, opportunity and choice.

The poles are there. The fibre belongs on them. We have done most of the hard work already. The PPP model is not about starting from scratch. It is about finally using what we have.

---

FURTHER READING

AFD Ethiopia OPGW rehabilitation project: afd.fr — Rehabilitation of damaged optical ground wire in post-conflict areas