Africa has more international bandwidth than at any point in its history. New submarine cables have expanded capacity, created new landing points and improved the continent’s access to global internet hubs. In many markets, the cost of international capacity has fallen significantly compared with the early years of African broadband.
Yet for many businesses, public institutions and communities, the experience of connectivity has not improved at the same pace.
Bandwidth can land at the coast and still fail to reach the economy.
This is Africa’s missing middle.
The missing middle is the infrastructure gap between international capacity and actual users. It includes national backbones, metro fibre, cross-border routes, open-access networks, Internet exchange points, carrier-neutral data centres, reliable power and the commercial arrangements that allow capacity to move from landing stations to cities, enterprises, public institutions and underserved communities.
Submarine cables solve one part of the connectivity problem albeit one of the biggest: international access. They bring capacity to coastal landing points and connect African markets to global networks. But once that capacity lands, it must still travel inland. It must cross rights-of-way, pass through national backbones, connect to local operators, reach data centres, exchange traffic locally and serve end users at prices they can afford.
That is where the bottleneck often begins.
In too many African markets, the cost of moving capacity inland remains high. Fibre routes usually are operator fiefdoms. Rights-of-way can be expensive, unpredictable or slow to secure. Operators often duplicate infrastructure along commercially attractive routes while less profitable areas remain underserved. Cross-border links may exist, but they are not always competitive, open or commercially easy to use. Internet exchange points may be present, but not yet strong enough to keep enough traffic local. Smaller operators may struggle to reach neutral facilities. Enterprises may depend on narrow provider choices.
The result is a paradox: Africa can have abundant international capacity and still face expensive, fragile domestic connectivity. For context, Lagos to London backhaul is about four times cheaper than Lagos to Abuja.
This is why cable landings should not be treated as the final measure of digital progress. They are the beginning of a longer infrastructure chain. If the middle of that chain is weak, the benefits of international bandwidth are diluted before they reach the people and institutions that need them.
The International Telecommunication Union’s work on submarine cable resilience reinforces this point. Resilience is not only about the cables under the ocean. It is about the systems connected to them. A country can have multiple submarine cables and still remain vulnerable if inland routes are concentrated, if repair processes are slow, if traffic exchange is weak, or if alternative terrestrial paths are limited.
For Africa, this is especially important because the continent’s digital economy is becoming more infrastructure-dependent.
Data centers need dependable fiber routes to attract cloud, enterprise and content workloads. Cloud providers need regional reach before deploying deeper infrastructure. Banks, fintechs and public agencies need resilient networks and cloud infrastructure to support payments, identity systems, tax platforms and digital services. Universities and hospitals need reliable capacity that is not limited to capital cities. AI infrastructure needs low-latency access to compute, data and users. Investors need to know that capacity can move from landing stations to demand clusters.
If the middle mile is weak, every part of the digital economy becomes more expensive to scale.
This is not only a connectivity problem. It is an economic development problem.
When domestic transport is costly, enterprises pay more for cloud and connectivity. When cross-border routes are weak, regional digital trade becomes harder. When traffic travels unnecessarily through distant hubs, latency increases and local digital services perform worse. When IXPs are underdeveloped, the value of local hosting is reduced. When enterprises operate without autonomous system numbers, they often have less control over routing, fewer options for multi-homing, weaker provider independence and limited ability to peer directly, and end up paying more for connectivity while receiving less resilience, less flexibility and poorer performance than their digital operations require. When inland cities are poorly connected, digital investment concentrates around coastal or capital-city markets.
The missing middle therefore shapes where digital opportunity appears and where it does not.
It also affects the business case for data centers. A data center is not valuable simply because it is built. It becomes valuable when networks, cloud platforms, content providers, enterprises, public institutions and digital services connect inside and around it. Without strong interconnection, data centers risk becoming isolated warehouses rather than active digital marketplaces.
The same is true for cloud adoption. Enterprises will not move workloads locally simply because local infrastructure exists. They need reliability, pricing, security, compliance, ecosystem depth and performance. Much of that depends on the quality of connectivity around data centers and between markets.
This is why the missing middle must become a central policy and investment priority.
Operators have a role to play. Africa needs shared backbone investment, open-access corridors, stronger metro fiber, better cross-border links and more carrier-neutral interconnection points. It also needs stronger local traffic exchange, more active ASN adoption, better routing practices, and commercial models that allow smaller operators, enterprises and public institutions to participate in the connectivity ecosystem.
Governments have a major role to play. They can reduce rights-of-way costs, harmonise permits, protect fibre corridors and treat digital infrastructure as critical economic infrastructure. They can support infrastructure sharing, prevent unnecessary duplication and ensure that public projects create open capacity rather than closed networks.
Regulators also matter. They can encourage fair access to essential facilities, support local peering, improve market transparency and reduce barriers to cross-border interconnection. They can help ensure that the benefits of international capacity are not trapped by bottlenecks in domestic transport.
Regional bodies have an equally important role. Digital markets do not stop at national borders. If Africa wants a continental digital economy, it needs cross-border corridors that allow data, cloud services, payments, content and enterprise traffic to move reliably across regions. This requires harmonised rules, coordinated planning and infrastructure finance that recognises regional demand.
Investors must also rethink the economics of connectivity. The highest returns may come from dense urban routes, but digital resilience requires redundancy and reach. Financing models must support commercially difficult routes, shared infrastructure, blended finance and long-term capital for backbone networks. The missing middle will not be solved only by funding the easiest corridors.
Large buyers can help create demand. Governments, manufacturing companies, banks, universities, hospitals, cloud platforms, content companies and enterprises can become anchor users for local hosting, regional connectivity and resilient routing. Their procurement choices can either reinforce dependence on foreign-hosted systems and narrow routes, or help build the demand base for African infrastructure.
Africa also needs better infrastructure intelligence. It is difficult to finance, regulate or coordinate what is not clearly mapped. Policymakers and investors need better data on fibre routes, rights-of-way, IXPs, data centres, landing stations, traffic flows, capacity prices, outage risks and underserved demand clusters. Without that visibility, investment decisions remain fragmented.
What is clear is that international bandwidth is not the same as usable connectivity.
Usable connectivity requires the middle mile.
It requires the systems that take capacity from landing stations to inland markets, from coastal cities to regional corridors, from international links to local exchanges, and from infrastructure assets to real economic demand.
Digital access in Africa is not only by how many cables land on its shores. It will be determined by how effectively that capacity is distributed, exchanged, protected and used.
African connectivity must now focus on the missing middle: the corridors, exchanges, routes and commercial models that turn bandwidth into resilience.
Cable capacity can land at the coast. But digital transformation happens when that capacity reaches the continent.
