East Africa shows why Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital future will be decided inland

By Kevin Kaburu, Managing Director: Digital Infrastructure at Seacom East Africa and Middle East

Imagine it’s a Friday afternoon in Kampala. A small clothing retailer is preparing for one of its busiest trading weekends. Customers are queuing to pay using mobile money, while the owner is placing an urgent order with a supplier in Nairobi through a cloud-based inventory system. Suddenly, everything stops.

Card payments fail. Mobile money transactions time out. Inventory systems freeze. Within minutes, a problem that began hundreds of kilometres away on an undersea cable has become a crisis for a small business that has never seen the ocean.

This story could just as easily unfold in Lusaka, Kigali, Gaborone, Pretoria, Harare or Blantyre. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, businesses increasingly depend on digital infrastructure that extends far beyond the coastline.

The real journey begins inland

Recently, hundreds of business leaders, policymakers and technology experts gathered in Mombasa for the “Our Ocean Conference” on Africa’s blue economy. I was among them, and although the conference focused on East Africa’s maritime economy, its central lesson extends across Sub-Saharan Africa: advancing public-private action to unlock blue economy investment and building resilience for a regenerative and sustainable future.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, significant investment has expanded international connectivity through submarine cables – nowhere more visibly than in East Africa. Today, more than 95% of international internet traffic travels through subsea cables linking Africa to Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. But landing data on the coastline is only the first step.

The real challenge – and the next frontier of the region’s digital transformation – is ensuring that data moves quickly, securely and reliably beyond the coast to businesses, hospitals, schools and governments. That is what turns connectivity into economic value: no longer simply getting online, but keeping business, public services and trade running when disruption occurs.

It is about ensuring that a fintech transaction in Kigali never fails because a cable was cut off the coast of Kenya. It is also about allowing a manufacturer in Zambia, a logistics company in Botswana or an exporter in Malawi to access cloud platforms without interruption.

The cost of a single point of failure

Despite remarkable progress, Africa’s digital infrastructure remains vulnerable when too much traffic relies on too few routes. Damage to a single submarine cable, whether from shipping activity, seismic events or infrastructure failure, can ripple across multiple countries within hours, slowing internet speeds, disrupting financial services and increasing operating costs for businesses.

While submarine cables connect Africa to the world, terrestrial fibre networks carry that connectivity inland to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and eastern DRC in East Africa, and from landing stations in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Namibia onward to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Malawi. When those routes are concentrated around a handful of transit corridors, resilience suffers.

Why route diversity matters

To give a simplistic analogy, assume every truck travelling from the Port of Mombasa to Kampala had only one highway available, a single accident would bring trade to a standstill. Digital infrastructure works the same way. Every additional fibre route creates another highway for data, allowing information to reroute automatically whenever one path becomes congested or damaged.

In 2023 alone, 200 cable repairs were reported worldwide. The widespread disruptions of 2024 affected businesses across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and a recent outage on Africa’s west coast kept networks down for more than a day across several markets, along with the financial institutions, telecoms operators and cloud services that rely on them.

For a logistics company tracking trucks between Nairobi and Kampala, or a fintech processing thousands of mobile payments per minute, milliseconds of delay can erode customer confidence. For exporters, manufacturers, hospitals and universities, resilient connectivity is no longer a convenience; it is operational infrastructure.

From connectivity to resilience

Fortunately, a new generation of digital infrastructure investment is strengthening resilience in East Africa and beyond, through new terrestrial fibre corridors, regional internet exchanges and expanded cross-border connectivity linking Southern, Central and West Africa.

Projects such as the Umoja cable, connecting Africa and Australia, and the 2Africa cable, create multiple landing points across East Africa, while planned additions such as the Blu Rahman & Dare-1 cable extension will boost capacity and provide additional resilience. At Seacom, we are building towards future-proof multi-terabit networks. Most recently, we launched a high-capacity route connecting Nairobi, Kisumu and Kampala, reinforcing one of East Africa’s most critical digital corridors.

Together, these new projects form a multi-lane digital highway: a resilient network of interconnected routes capable of supporting the region’s growing demand for cloud computing, artificial intelligence, financial technology and cross-border trade.

A blueprint for Sub-Saharan Africa

That momentum is real, but sustaining it will depend on continued investment and coordination. The next chapter of Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital economy is already being written in East Africa. In tomorrow’s economy, competitive advantage will not simply depend on being connected to the world. It will depend on remaining connected when the unexpected happens. Infrastructure providers and the private sector must keep investing in route diversity, cross-border collaboration and future-ready infrastructure. Governments, in turn, must create policy and regulatory environments in which the ICT sector can flourish.

The next decade of Africa’s digital economy will be defined not by how much data lands on our shores, but by the resilience of the networks we build across our continent, the difference between being merely connected and truly digitally competitive. The countries that invest in that resilience today will lead tomorrow’s digital economy.