The links use Taara, a wireless optical technology developed inside X, Alphabet’s moonshot lab, and spun out as its own company. Taara and Liquid, a business of Cassava Technologies, said on 5 August 2026 that the deployment now serves internet service providers, banks, hotels and a utility company in Lagos, Nigeria.

Fibre without the trench

Taara’s Lightbridge terminals send data on narrow, invisible beams between two points, carrying up to 20 Gbps over distances of up to 20 km. Because nothing is buried, a link needs no trenching, no civil works and no spectrum licence, which is what makes it attractive in a city where digging is slow, expensive or simply not permitted.

“Traditional fibre deployments aren’t always a possibility, especially across difficult terrains,” said Eugene Uka, acting chief executive of Liquid Intelligent Technologies Nigeria. “Taara links can often be installed and activated within hours.” The companies said links typically go live in days where a fibre build would take weeks.

Resilience is the real sell

The deployment distributes capacity from Liquid’s points of presence at Africa Data Centres and other Nigerian facilities to enterprises beyond the reach of existing fibre. It also gives those customers a second path when the first one breaks.

That matters in Lagos, where a fibre cut can take days to repair, and construction damage is routine. A light link running alongside a fibre route is a fallback that does not share the same trench, and therefore does not fail with it.

Bhavesh Mistry, Taara’s regional lead for Africa, was careful not to oversell the substitution. “Fibre remains an essential part of modern communications infrastructure, and will for some time,” he said, describing wireless optical links as another tool for extending capacity rather than a replacement.

Where it goes next

Liquid said it is exploring extending the technology to Abuja, Ibadan and Kano. Taara says Lightbridge is deployed in more than 20 countries with operators including T-Mobile, Airtel, Digicel and SoftBank.

The Nigerian context helps explain the appetite. Liquid closed a $660m debt round in April, and other operators are still committing capital to conventional builds: Dimension Data raised $2.9m to expand Nigerian fibre in July. Light links are being added around that fibre, not instead of it.

Member records at the exchanges show four joins since June: CDN77 and Angola Cables at JINX, and Kaopu Cloud HK and AFRICLOUD at IXPN Lagos.

Second exchanges, not first ones

The pattern is what makes this worth noting. CDN77 has peered at NAPAfrica Johannesburg since August 2022 and has now added JINX. Angola Cables has been at NAPAfrica since December 2016 and at IXPN Lagos since September 2018, and added JINX in June. Kaopu Cloud HK joined NAPAfrica in 2021, and Lagos last month.

A network peering at an exchange in a city gets local traffic from that exchange. A network peering at two gets a fallback path that stays within the country when the first fabric or a particular member’s port fails. For content networks serving South African users, the difference shows up as whether a request is served locally or hauled to Europe when something breaks.

The exchanges have been building for this

The additions land on fabrics that have spent the year adding capacity. IXPN upgraded to 400G peering at three Lagos sites in July, and NTT DATA became the first ISP in Africa to peer at 400 Gbps at JINX in April. Those ports only incur their cost if there are networks on the other side.

Peer counts give a rough sense of scale: the IPv6 route collector at JINX currently sees roughly 206 peers, and IXPN’s IPv6 route server about 90.

Benin, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria and Togo are backing ATLAS Umoja AI, announced in Abuja, Nigeria, on 24 July 2026 by the GSMA together with the five countries’ digital ministries and four African technology companies: Awarri, Zindi, Pawa AI and Mozisha.

What ATLAS Umoja is meant to do

The initiative is designed to pool expertise, datasets and best practices across governments, industry and researchers, to develop AI that reflects African languages and development priorities rather than importing models trained elsewhere. It builds on Nigeria’s national N-ATLAS programme, which the organisers describe as the first step towards the continental version.

Angela Wamola, head of Africa at the GSMA, said the initiative targets two of the biggest barriers to internet adoption. “By making AI and digital services available in the languages people speak every day, the initiative will help tackle two of the biggest barriers to internet adoption, digital literacy and locally relevant content,” she said.

Bosun Tijani, Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, framed it in terms of sovereignty, saying AI’s benefits must be built on African languages, cultures and knowledge systems. Ministers from Nigeria, Namibia and Togo serve on the AI for Good Global Commission, whose momentum the launch builds on.

The declaration behind it

The launch accompanied the Abuja Ministerial Declaration on Meaningful Connectivity for Africa, adopted by ministers and heads of delegation at the African Telecommunications Union’s Conference of Plenipotentiaries. The declaration commits governments to digital inclusion, technology-neutral regulation, resilient digital infrastructure and locally relevant digital services.

Caroline Mbugua, the GSMA’s senior director for public policy in Africa, said the declaration signals that African governments share a common vision for investment-friendly policy. Delegates also examined technology-neutral satellite licensing, a live question for regulators weighing how to admit low-earth-orbit operators.

The language focus is not new ground for these partners. Zindi ran the GSMA-backed challenge that turned 42,000 crowd-sourced attacks into a public AI safety benchmark across eight African languages, published earlier this year.

This is a developing story. We will update as more information becomes available.

The event, which runs in Cape Town, South Africa, said on 3 August 2026 that Solly Malatsi, South Africa’s Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, will headline. His department is a strategic partner of the festival. Registration for the 2026 edition opened at the CTICC in April.

Who is on the bill

The hyperscalers are represented by Alex Okosi, managing director for Africa at Google, and Robert Koen, managing director for sub-Saharan Africa at Amazon. Marcel Louw, Digital Realty’s managing director for Africa, covers the data centre side.

The most notable name is Emmanuel Lubanzadio, listed as Africa Lead at OpenAI, who is billed to speak on AI adoption and readiness across African markets. A dedicated Africa lead on a Cape Town stage is a more concrete signal of intent than the partnership announcements that have characterised most AI-in-Africa news so far.

Telecoms is covered by Enzo Scarcella, chief consumer officer at MTN Group, Norbert Prihoda, chief executive of Tunisie Telecom, and Daddy Yogo Ngbabendo, group vice president for solutions and architecture at Airtel Africa. Enterprise buyers are represented by Thato Sopeng of Sasol and Linda Oniwe of Standard Bank Group.

Why the mix matters

The line-up tracks where capital is actually moving: AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, subsea cables, fibre and data centres. Pairing a minister with an OpenAI country lead, two hyperscalers and a data centre operator on the same programme reflects how closely African AI capacity now depends on policy decisions and physical infrastructure landing together.

David Monaghan, vice president of Africa Tech Festival, said the pace of collaboration across industries was what stood out this year, with investment flowing and partnerships forming. The organisers said further ministers, enterprise CIOs, operators and investors will be announced in the coming months.

This is a developing story. We will update as more information becomes available.

Wadaag Bank, the territory’s sixth licensed commercial bank, was inaugurated at the Sarovar Premiere Hotel in Hargeisa, Somaliland, on 31 August 2025, at a ceremony the bank says was attended by the President of the Republic of Somaliland and senior government officials. Almost a year later it is only now opening for commercial business: its own website still carried a “coming soon” notice on 2 August 2026.

The bank is licensed by the Central Bank of Somaliland and describes itself as digital-first and fully Sharia-compliant. Its ownership structure is the unusual part. Shares are sold to the public at $1,100 each across three tiers, from founding shareholders holding 500 shares or more down to general shareholders with fewer than 100.

Mobile money is the part of Somaliland’s financial system that already works. Telesom’s Zaad and Dahabshiil’s eDahab are used almost universally, and Wadaag says its platform interoperates with both. Elsewhere on the continent that kind of interoperability has taken years of regulatory pressure, as with Kenya’s operator integration, or purpose-built open-source rails such as Mojaloop.

Abdirahman Muse, chief executive of Wadaag Bank, answered tech.africa’s written questions on what digital-first means in a territory where formal banking is concentrated in four cities, how Sharia structures hold up inside an app, and what it costs to build a bank that the global financial system does not formally recognise.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for brand conventions, house style and length. The structure of Muse’s answers is preserved.

What gap in Somaliland’s financial system did Wadaag set out to fill?

When we launched Wadaag Bank, our vision was not simply to establish another bank. We wanted to transform financial inclusion in Somaliland. Although the banking sector has grown in recent years, it remains relatively small, with Wadaag becoming only the sixth licensed commercial bank.

We identified several major gaps. Existing banking services are concentrated in urban areas, many productive sectors remain underserved, and access to affordable Sharia-compliant finance is still limited. Digital banking capabilities are also underdeveloped, particularly for rural communities.

Our priority customers include individuals and families, SMEs, women entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs, farmers, livestock producers, the Somali diaspora, and businesses that have traditionally been underserved by the formal banking sector.

What does “digital-first” mean in practice in Somaliland?

For us, digital-first means bringing the bank to the customer instead of requiring the customer to travel to the bank. Traditional banking services are largely concentrated in cities such as Hargeisa, Berbera, Burao and Borama, leaving many communities without convenient access to formal financial services.

Through our Wadaag Pay wallet and our website, customers can:

• Open accounts remotely without visiting a branch
• Complete digital onboarding with remote biometric identity verification
• Receive transaction alerts by SMS and WhatsApp
• Transfer money instantly
• Apply online for Islamic financing
• Receive financing digitally and repay electronically
• Reach services by smartphone, or by USSD where there is no internet access
• Transact with both the Zaad and eDahab mobile money platforms

This digital ecosystem allows us to reach customers anywhere in Somaliland while significantly reducing the cost of banking.

How do Sharia principles and digital banking combine?

Digital banking and Islamic finance are fully compatible. Technology is simply a delivery channel. Sharia compliance depends on the structure of the transaction rather than the method through which it is conducted.

One of the established principles of Islamic jurisprudence holds that commercial transactions are permissible unless they contain a prohibited element such as riba (interest), gharar (excessive uncertainty) or maysir (gambling).

Every investment and financing application submitted through our digital channels undergoes the same review as an in-person application. Each transaction is reviewed by our investment team, our compliance function and our Sharia Supervisory Board before approval. Customers can access Mudarabah investment accounts, Murabaha asset finance, home financing, SME financing, agricultural finance and trade finance digitally. Technology improves speed and convenience while preserving full Sharia compliance.

How is the bank reaching women, young entrepreneurs and small businesses?

Financial inclusion is one of Wadaag Bank’s founding objectives. We are using technology, agency banking and community partnerships to reach people who have traditionally been excluded. Our strategy is built around four pillars.

On financial inclusion, we are formalising traditional Hagbad savings groups, a rotating savings and credit association, expanding access to rural communities, providing Islamic microfinance and targeting more than 100,000 previously unbanked customers within five years.

On economic empowerment, we finance SMEs, support women-owned businesses, finance agriculture and livestock, and provide Qard Hasan, an interest-free loan, alongside partnership-based financing.

On financial literacy, we run community education campaigns, partner with universities and vocational institutions, and deliver youth-focused education through digital platforms.

On community development, we finance infrastructure through Sukuk, support renewable energy projects and are creating a Community Investment Fund linked to Zakat principles.

The biggest challenges remain financial literacy, digital literacy and reaching remote populations. However, technology is helping us overcome these barriers faster than ever before.

Why focus lending on livestock, agriculture and fisheries?

Productive sectors are the backbone of Somaliland’s economy. Agriculture and livestock alone account for over 60% of employment, yet they receive only a small share of formal financing.

Rather than focusing primarily on consumer lending, Wadaag Bank prioritises financing activities that create jobs, increase exports and stimulate long-term growth. That includes Murabaha financing for farm inputs, Ijarah leasing for agricultural and mining equipment, Mudarabah livestock investment partnerships, Musharakah financing for food processing and manufacturing, Wakalah solutions for agricultural cooperatives, warehouse receipt financing, Takaful-based risk protection, and export finance with Sharia-compliant guarantees.

Our financing decisions combine traditional credit analysis with sector expertise, cash-flow assessment and Sharia compliance.

How does the public-ownership model work?

Wadaag Bank is incorporated as a limited liability company under Somaliland’s Companies Act and is licensed by the Central Bank of Somaliland.

We deliberately adopted a broad ownership model because we believe banking institutions should be owned by the communities they serve. Founding shareholders hold 500 shares or more, major shareholders hold 100 to 499, and general shareholders hold fewer than 100. Each share is valued at $1,100. This model promotes transparency, strong corporate governance, broad public participation and long-term financial sustainability.

How does operating in an unrecognised state shape what the bank can do?

The Central Bank of Somaliland has made significant progress in strengthening banking supervision, corporate governance, capital requirements, anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing compliance, and consumer protection. That has created a more stable and transparent environment.

Operating in Somaliland presents both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, we have the flexibility to innovate and build solutions tailored to our local economy. On the other, because Somaliland is not internationally recognised as a sovereign state, establishing correspondent banking relationships and accessing global financial infrastructure requires additional due diligence and strategic partnerships.

To address this, we are actively building relationships with regional and international financial institutions while investing heavily in compliance systems that meet international standards. Our objective is to provide secure international payment, trade finance and remittance services while maintaining the highest regulatory and compliance standards.

What is operational today, and what comes next?

Our institutional foundation is in place. We have secured our banking licence, established our governance framework, recruited an experienced board member and management team, completed our core banking infrastructure and finalised our digital banking platform.

Over the next twelve months our focus is execution and expansion:

• Official public launch of banking operations in early August 2026
• Opening our headquarters in Hargeisa and a first branch in Berbera, next to the port
• Expanding SME, agriculture, livestock and housing finance from September 2026
• Introducing diaspora investment products from September 2026
• Establishing correspondent banking relationships from October 2026
• Launching Islamic investment products from November 2026
• Launching Wadaag Pay nationwide in January 2027
• Rolling out agency banking across Somaliland from May 2027, with more than 100 agents
• Growing to more than 20,000 customers in the first year
• Reaching 90% digital transaction adoption among active customers

What are the biggest challenges to building a digital bank in Somaliland?

The biggest challenge is not technology, it is adoption. Many people remain outside the formal banking system, internet connectivity varies across regions and financial literacy remains relatively low. Another challenge is building international banking connectivity while operating in a unique jurisdiction.

Despite these challenges, Somaliland also presents enormous opportunities. Mobile money adoption is among the highest in Africa, creating an ideal foundation for digital banking innovation.

What to watch

Wadaag’s targets are specific enough to be tested against: 20,000 customers in the first year, 90% digital transaction adoption among active users, and 100,000 previously unbanked customers within five years. Its own timeline puts correspondent banking relationships in October 2026, two months after operations begin.

That is the number worth returning to. Everything else on the list is within the bank’s control; a correspondent relationship is not, because it depends on a foreign institution deciding the compliance risk of an unrecognised jurisdiction is worth taking. Until one does, cross-border value will keep moving through remittance networks and, increasingly, through dollar-denominated virtual accounts built on stablecoin rails.

Wadaag Bank in pictures

Images supplied by Wadaag Bank covering the August 2025 launch ceremony in Hargeisa, partnership meetings, and the bank’s appearances at Tech Expo Somaliland and the Hargeysa International Book Fair.

The format is deliberately not a pitch contest. Over an intensive four-day sprint from 20 to 24 August 2026, participants must build and submit working prototypes or completed projects, using Gebeya’s Dala Studio platform, computing resources and hands-on technical support rather than slide decks.

Tools in the hands of creators

The competition is open to amateur, emerging and established creators across Africa, individuals or teams, with no requirement for a production company, a conventional studio or an existing audience. Between 30 and 40 ambassadors from Gebeya’s community will help participants navigate the platform and make use of the computing resources during the sprint.

“Africa’s creators are visible and have the digital talent but have often lacked the financial backing and access to digital tools to grow their trade,” said Temwa Gondwe, director of creatives and diaspora at Afreximbank. Amadou Daffe, chief executive and co-founder of Gebeya, pointed to the commercial case: recorded-music revenues in Sub-Saharan Africa grew by more than 20% in a single year, the gaming market is expanding, and Nigeria’s film industry remains among the world’s largest by production volume, yet many creators still lack the production infrastructure to capitalise on it.

How the money is split

The $50,000 pool is spread across the three categories rather than concentrated in a single grand prize. Each of music, video, and gaming will award $7,000 for first place, $3,500 for second, and $1,500 for third, with additional $500 awards for qualifying finalists. Entries are first screened for eligibility with technology assistance, then opened to a public vote that narrows the field to a top 100, before an expert panel from the creative, technology and business sectors picks the winners.

Why it matters

Africa’s creative industries are routinely described as under-monetised: huge cultural output, thin infrastructure to turn it into durable businesses. Putting a development-bank name and real tooling behind a build-something competition, rather than another awards ceremony, is an attempt to move creators “from inspiration to execution”, as Daffe put it, and to keep more of the value on the continent. The gaming category in particular sits alongside a broader push into African gaming culture, from grassroots creators to the reinvention of long-running events such as rAge into full festivals.

Whether a four-day sprint produces anything commercially durable is the fair question, and the winners’ real test will come after the prize money. But placing tools and funding directly in creators’ hands, on the premise that the talent is already there, is a more useful intervention than most.

The centrepiece is the draft International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) Roadmap 2026, published on 27 July. ICASA describes it as a long-term framework for planning, managing and assigning the spectrum needed for current and future generations of mobile broadband, explicitly including IMT-2030, the standards family the industry markets as 6G.

Reading the headline number carefully

ICASA’s stated ambition is to lift the spectrum available for broadband from about 850 MHz today to at least 18,588 MHz by 2030. Taken at face value that is a twenty-fold increase, and it deserves an immediate caveat: most of that volume comes from millimetre-wave bands, which are counted in thousands of megahertz each but travel only short distances and struggle to pass through walls.

The roadmap identifies mmWave ranges from the International Telecommunication Union’s 2024 Radio Regulations, including 24.25 to 27.5 GHz, 37.5 to 43.5 GHz, 45.5 to 47 GHz and 47.2 to 48.2 GHz. Useful spectrum, but for dense urban capacity and fixed wireless rather than coverage.

The more meaningful figure sits alongside it: ICASA says the proposed measures would raise the availability of high-demand spectrum by roughly 215%. High-demand spectrum is the sought-after lower and mid-band capacity that operators actually compete for, because it carries far enough to cover a suburb or a rural district. A 215% increase, there matters more to ordinary coverage than the twenty-fold headline does. Implementation is planned across the next five to ten years.

A frequency plan you can search

The roadmap follows the updated National Radio Frequency Plan 2026, published on 24 July, which sets out how each slice of the airwaves may be used. On 29 July, ICASA added the Electronic Frequency Information System (EFIS), an online platform that turns that plan into a navigable document, searchable by band, and downloadable with supporting International Telecommunication Union recommendations.

“The launch of EFIS demonstrates ICASA’s commitment to building a modern, digital, transparent and efficient spectrum management environment,” said Councillor Andrew Matseke, chairperson of the National Radio Frequency Plan Committee. The regulator says the system is aimed at operators, equipment manufacturers, researchers, academia, investors and the general public alike.

Why it matters

Spectrum is the raw material of mobile coverage, and South Africa has a long history of releasing it slowly. Publishing a decade-long roadmap, rather than running auctions band by band as pressure builds, gives operators something to plan capital against and gives equipment vendors a signal about which bands to build for.

It also comes as the continent’s mobile market is growing rapidly, with Sub-Saharan Africa forecast to be the world’s fastest-growing 5G market. Regulators elsewhere are moving on the same problem from the other end, as with Ghana’s decision to open 5G spectrum to competitive bidding after its single-wholesale-network model stalled.

The roadmap remains a draft, open to stakeholder comment within the period specified in the Government Gazette, and any actual assignment will still run through final spectrum assignment plans and formal invitations to apply under the Radio Frequency Spectrum Regulations of 2015. Publishing a plan is not the same as releasing spectrum, and on that distinction ICASA’s recent record on numbering reform suggests the process can take time.

The 2026 edition runs from 27 to 29 November at Fourways Mall in Johannesburg, South Africa, and widens the format well beyond the traditional exhibition floor. Alongside the games, the event will feature esports, content creators, cosplay, anime, live entertainment, and community spaces, aimed not only at South African fans but also at players and creators across the continent.

From expo to festival

The reframing tracks how gaming has changed. “Today’s gamers don’t just play games,” said Barry Louzada, managing director of Mettlestate. “They also watch esports, follow creators, build communities, embrace technology, celebrate cosplay, create content and experience gaming as a culture that extends far beyond the screen.” The festival, he said, has been built around that culture rather than bolted on to the old expo.

The organisers are keeping the fixtures that built the brand: the Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) LAN, competitive esports, cosplay, local game development, tabletop gaming and hardware showcases all stay. A new visual identity and a “retrofuturism” creative theme, mixing gaming’s nostalgic past with a look ahead, sit atop that foundation.

Why it matters

African gaming and esports have spent years as an afterthought in global coverage while quietly building real audiences, and events are where that audience becomes visible and commercial. Pulling an established expo up into a festival, with Mettlestate adding competitive esports and community expertise, is a bet that there is now enough of a market, of players, creators, sponsors and spectators, to sustain the bigger format.

“We’ve spent 23 years building one of South Africa’s most recognised gaming brands,” said Michael James, project director of rAge. “Now we are taking the biggest step in our history.” How far the continental ambition reaches beyond a Johannesburg venue is the open question, but the direction reflects gaming’s growing pull on African digital culture, a pull that institutional money is starting to follow, from Afreximbank and Gebeya’s $50,000 build competition for creators in gaming, music and video. Ticketing and programme details are still to come.

It is the output of the challenge launched by the GSMA and Zindi in March 2026, which invited data scientists across the continent to stress-test large language models in African languages and contexts. The final dataset represents 307 contributors whose submissions survived validation.

What the dataset contains

Swahili accounts for the largest share of the tests at 33.4%, followed by Hausa at 21.6%, Yoruba at 14.1% and Igbo at 9.3%. Zulu (6.4%), Afrikaans (3.7%), Amharic (3.3%) and Akan (3.2%) make up the rest.

The risks participants probed for cluster around real-world harm rather than abstract misuse. Harmful instructions were the largest category at 14.5%, followed by illegal activity at 13.0%, misinformation and cybersecurity at 9.3% each, and unsafe medical advice at 7.7%.

The techniques are a catalogue of how people actually get models to break their own rules: roleplay (12.9%), indirect requests (10.4%), hypothetical scenarios (9.7%) and context poisoning (8.0%).

What it does not do

One clarification matters. The benchmark is a body of test cases, not a scorecard: the published material reports no model-by-model results, no comparative scores and no failure rates for any particular AI system. It gives researchers and developers a standardised way to test models against African-language attacks, but it does not yet tell anyone which models fail.

Why it matters

AI safety testing is overwhelmingly built in English, and safeguards that hold in English routinely collapse in lower-resource languages, where the guardrail training data barely exists. A model that refuses a dangerous request in English may answer the same request in Hausa. Benchmarks written by native speakers, in context, are the only practical way to find those gaps.

The crowdsourced method is the interesting part: rather than commissioning a lab, the organisers paid attention to people who speak the languages, and 42,000 submissions became 4,216 verified tests. It sits alongside other efforts to close the African-language gap in AI, such as the CommonLingua language-identification model covering 334 languages.

The value now depends on adoption. A benchmark only bites if the companies shipping models into African markets actually run against it, and publish what happens when they do.

The company, a technology and connectivity provider based in Lagos, Nigeria, announced the closing at a signing ceremony on 27 July 2026. Pathway Advisors Limited acted as lead issuing house and book runner, with the raise structured through a special purpose vehicle, Dimension Data SPV Limited.

Debt, not equity, for infrastructure

The choice of instrument is part of the story. Rather than raise equity or lean on bank loans, the company issued a corporate bond, tapping high-net-worth investors for longer-dated capital of the kind that fibre roll-outs, with their upfront costs and slow paybacks, actually need. Adekunle Alade, founder and chief executive of Pathway Advisors, noted that investors backed the issuance “despite prevailing preferences for shorter-term investments”, a pointed observation in a market where inflation and high yields push most money toward short maturities.

Shatse Kakwagh, managing partner of Mbavaa Partners and a director of the special purpose vehicle, described the deal as the end of a two-year process. “This funding is not the destination,” he said, “it is the beginning of an even bigger journey.” The N4.05 billion is the first drawdown against the N20 billion programme, so further tranches can follow as the build progresses.

Who the fibre is for

The expansion is aimed squarely at business demand. The company said the new capacity will serve financial institutions, fintechs and enterprise customers, the users whose cloud adoption, digital financial services and data-heavy applications are driving Nigeria’s appetite for reliable connectivity.

“Beyond delivering technology solutions, we work every day to strengthen Nigeria’s digital economy,” said Olugbenga Olabiyi, managing director of Dimension Data Limited, framing the raise as investment in “infrastructure that supports businesses, innovation and national digital transformation”.

Why it matters

Fibre is the quiet layer beneath everything Nigeria’s technology sector is trying to do. The same enterprise and fintech growth that draws attention to apps and platforms depends on physical fibre reaching offices, data centres and exchange points, and financing that build-out is one of the market’s persistent bottlenecks. Watching a local operator fund fibre through the domestic capital market, rather than foreign development finance, is a small sign of that gap starting to close, and it sits alongside the wider data-centre and infrastructure build-out under way across Nigeria.

The figures are modest against the scale of the task, and the bulk of the N20 billion programme is still to be drawn. But the direction, patient local capital financing hard infrastructure, is the kind the market needs more of, echoing the pull of carrier and data-centre investment into under-served African markets.