African governments want more investment in fibre, data centres and digital infrastructure. But operators say securing a licence can be only the beginning of a much herculean journey through multiple regulators, permits and layers of government.
For an investor building digital infrastructure in Africa, obtaining a licence does not necessarily mean construction can begin.
In Nigeria, a fibre operator with regulatory approval may still need rights of way and permits from state and local governments, negotiate with traditional and community leaders, and contend with informal payments demanded by local groups or “area boys” simply to install or repair cables. A tower developer can face additional building, environmental and civil aviation approvals, while a data centre developer may have to navigate separate processes for power, land, construction and environmental compliance.
Each requirement may be legitimate. Together, however, they can create a regulatory maze in which the investor receives permission to operate but still lacks a predictable path to actually build.
That gap between licensing and deployment emerged as one of the central concerns at the Africa Hyperscalers-hosted Regulatory Roundtable at ITW Africa in Nairobi, themed “Regulation That Builds: Aligning Policy and Digital Infrastructure Investment Priorities.”
The session was chaired by Temitope Osunrinde, Director of Africa Hyperscalers, and brought together Caroline Okafor, Legal, Enforcement and Regulation, Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC); Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, CCIE, Director-General/CEO, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA); Tony Izuagbe Emoekpere, President, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON); Mercy Ndegwa, Director of Public Policy, East & Horn of Africa and Economic Policy Lead, Africa, Meta; and Eng. Dennis Chepkwony, Director, Universal Service Fund, Communications Authority of Kenya.
For NITDA’s Abdullahi, the problem partly reflects the way governments themselves are organised.
“Government is bureaucratic, and we are learning from our mistakes,” Abdullahi said, pointing to multiple institutions, regulators and sometimes duplicated responsibilities.
Investors, he argued, see things differently. “They don’t want to see government as multiple institutions. They want to see government as one entity.”
His proposed solution is a single regulatory interface through which investors can deal with government, while coordination among different agencies happens behind the scenes. Such an approach, he argued, could accelerate approvals, eliminate duplication and, crucially, give investors more predictable timelines.
That predictability matters because regulation is not simply a compliance issue. It affects the economics of infrastructure investment.
The hidden cost after the licence
Kenya provides an example of the challenge.
The country has introduced unified licensing in telecommunications, reducing some of the multiple interfaces operators previously faced when entering the market.
But obtaining the principal licence does not remove the approvals required to deploy infrastructure.
An operator rolling out fibre or mobile infrastructure may still need to engage county governments, obtain building permits, secure approvals from the civil aviation authority and satisfy environmental requirements.
Some of these approvals can also be sequential rather than simultaneous.
The result, according to the Engr. Chepkwony, can be an “indeterminate” timeline between receiving a licence and actually putting infrastructure into operation.
That uncertainty has a cost.
Capital committed to a project cannot generate returns while the project remains stuck in approval processes. Construction schedules become harder to predict. Financing costs can rise. Equipment and contractor commitments can be disrupted.
For infrastructure investors deciding between markets, the question is therefore not simply whether a country permits an investment. It is how long it takes to move from approval to operation — and whether that timeline can be reasonably predicted before capital is committed.
This is particularly important for digital infrastructure, where governments across Africa are simultaneously trying to attract investment into fibre networks, data centres, cloud infrastructure and the power systems needed to support them.
One investor, one government
The idea of a single interface does not necessarily mean eliminating sector regulators or stripping local governments of legitimate authority.
It means changing who bears the burden of navigating government.
Under the model discussed in Nairobi and mooted by Nigeria’s IT regulatory boss, Abdullahi, an investor would submit an application through one interface. The relevant government entity would then coordinate the other approvals required from agencies responsible for power, environment, construction, aviation or other areas.
“The investor is facing one person,” he stressed.
That is a significant distinction.
Today, governments often expect investors to understand the institutional architecture of the state: which ministry controls one approval, which regulator issues another, which county or state has jurisdiction, and in what order each process must be completed.
From an investor’s perspective, however, those distinctions matter far less. The investor is dealing with a country.
Abdullahi argues that government should therefore absorb more of the complexity itself.
His example of a data centre illustrates the point. A developer may receive approval to establish a facility only to begin dealing separately with the power requirements afterwards. Under a single-interface model, the licensing authority would instead coordinate with other relevant regulators so that the investor deals with one government-facing process.
Nigeria pushes co-regulation
Nigeria is also considering how to address another source of complexity: the convergence of technologies that historically sat within separate regulatory domains.
Telecommunications, cloud computing, data centres, financial services, cybersecurity, digital identity and data protection increasingly overlap. Yet the institutions responsible for regulating them often retain sector-specific mandates.
NITDA’s response is what Abdullahi describes as co-regulation.
Rather than requiring every institution to develop overlapping technology requirements, NITDA is exploring horizontal technology standards that sector regulators can incorporate into rules for the industries they supervise.
Abdullahi pointed to Nigeria’s National Sovereign Cloud Initiative as an example. He described it as a horizontal regulatory instrument that can underpin sector-specific requirements, including those developed for financial institutions.
The objective is that a bank, for example, should not need to separately navigate NITDA, the Nigerian Communications Commission and its financial-sector regulator on the same underlying technology issue. It should be able to deal primarily with its sector regulator, while government aligns the relevant standards behind the scenes.
This approach is still evolving, and its effectiveness will depend on implementation and coordination between institutions.
But the underlying principle is significant: as technologies converge, regulation may also need to become more interoperable.
The federal-local gap
A further challenge is that national policy is often only one part of an infrastructure project’s regulatory journey.
A government can establish a national broadband strategy or declare telecommunications infrastructure critical national infrastructure. But fibre is ultimately laid through physical communities, roads and jurisdictions.
That brings state, county and local authorities into the process.
The problem is particularly acute where fees, documentation and approval processes vary substantially between jurisdictions.
During the Nairobi discussion, Kenya was cited as an example of how requirements and charges can differ between counties. One proposed starting point was therefore not necessarily an immediate single national approval system, but greater standardisation of documentation, processes and fees across different authorities.
The same challenge exists in different forms across African markets.
A national government may want faster broadband deployment, while the operator building the network still has to negotiate rights of way and other approvals across multiple subnational jurisdictions.
Closing that gap between national policy and local execution could prove as important as reforming national licensing itself.
Regulation as infrastructure
The larger question is how African governments think about regulation.
Traditionally, regulation is viewed primarily as a mechanism for controlling markets, enforcing standards, protecting consumers and collecting statutory fees.
But in infrastructure markets, the design of regulation can also determine how quickly capital is deployed.
Abdullahi offered a different formulation in Nairobi. NITDA’s objective in regulation, he said, is to “create market, attract investors” and give businesses room to grow, rather than treating regulation primarily as a source of government revenue.
That does not mean removing regulation.
Digital infrastructure intersects with legitimate public concerns ranging from environmental protection and competition to cybersecurity, privacy, land use and national security.
The issue is whether those protections can be delivered through processes that are coordinated, predictable and time-bound.
Indeed, when Osunrinde asked panelists to identify one regulatory change that could materially improve digital infrastructure investment over the next 12 months, several answers converged around the same idea: coordinated approvals, one-stop licensing and regulatory certainty.
That convergence is telling.
Africa’s digital infrastructure deficit is frequently described as a financing problem. It unquestionably requires substantially more capital.
But attracting capital is only half the challenge.
Governments must also create conditions in which investors can deploy it.
For countries competing to attract the next fibre network, data centre or cloud region, the key performance indicator of an effective regulatory environment should not be whether an operator obtains a licence, but how quickly that licence translates into operating infrastructure.
