African ministers and partners have adopted a continental declaration committing to develop telecommunications infrastructure as a shared strategic foundation, setting out a five-year roadmap that frames connectivity not as a development goal but as a question of national and continental sovereignty.
The Algiers Declaration on African Telecommunications Sovereignty and Integrated Connectivity, adopted at a ministerial summit in Algiers during the first Global Africa Tech event, calls for integrated infrastructure linking terrestrial, subsea and satellite networks, stronger local data centre and internet exchange point capacity, cybersecurity resilience for critical infrastructure, and investment in human capital to anchor long-term digital self-determination across the continent.
The declaration’s sovereignty framing is deliberate and politically significant. African governments have grown increasingly vocal about the concentration of digital infrastructure ownership outside the continent, including subsea cable landing rights, cloud compute capacity and data routing, in the hands of non-African operators and hyperscalers. By embedding sovereignty language into a pan-African ministerial commitment, signatories are signalling that future infrastructure investment decisions will be evaluated not only on commercial terms but on questions of control, resilience and strategic autonomy.
The African Union Commission’s deputy chairperson, Selma Malika Haddadi, outlined the scale of the challenge at the event. Mobile broadband covers 86 per cent of Africa’s population, according to ITU data from end of 2024, but 14 per cent remain entirely unconnected, a figure that rises to 25 per cent in rural areas. More pointed still is what Haddadi called the usage gap: millions live within network coverage but remain offline due to device costs, data pricing, limited digital skills and low trust in digital systems.
“We cannot build systems that connect Africans if we remain disconnected in vision,” Haddadi said. “Pan-Africanism reminds us that Africa rises most strongly when it acts in coherence.”
The declaration’s five stated priorities are a resilient and diversified connectivity architecture across land, sea and space-based systems, closing the usage gap through affordability and digital literacy, localisation of compute and data capacity, reduction of regulatory fragmentation across borders, and cross-border spectrum coordination.
Kenya’s cabinet secretary for information and digital economy, William Kabogo Gitau, said implementation and measurable progress must now follow. “Africa is moving with clarity and purpose towards a connected, resilient, and sovereign digital future,” he said.
The test for the Algiers Declaration, like previous continental digital commitments including the Smart Africa Manifesto and the African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy, will be whether political alignment translates into coordinated capital deployment and enforceable regulatory harmonisation across 54 member states with deeply uneven infrastructure starting points.
