Governments have promised harmonised roaming, interconnected national backbones and regional digital services. But inconsistent licences, rights-of-way rules and border procedures continue to make infrastructure costly and regional connectivity unreliable.

West Africa has spent years promoting the idea of a single regional market. Citizens can travel across much of the region without visas, businesses trade under ECOWAS protocols, and governments have committed to deeper economic integration.

But the region’s telecommunications networks still encounter a thicket of regulatory and commercial borders.

A fibre operator attempting to connect two neighbouring countries can face different licences, rights-of-way charges, infrastructure-sharing rules and approval procedures on either side of the border. Mobile customers crossing between countries may encounter sharp increases in call and data prices, even when using networks owned by the same multinational operator.

The result is a region that aspires to become one digital market but still operates as a collection of separate telecommunications jurisdictions.

The challenge was examined at Hyperscalers Convergence Africa 2026 by a panel comprising Muhammed Rudman, Chief Executive Officer, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria; Abibat Kazeem, Commercial Director, Bayobab Nigeria; Dr Fiona Asonga, Chief Executive Officer, Technology Service Providers Association of Kenya; Alma Nurshaikhova, Senior Digital Specialist, World Bank; Marco Rebecchi, Nokia’s Country Manager for Nigeria and Ghana; and Salewa Oyagbola, Associate Director, IHS Towers.

Their discussion highlighted the gap between regional declarations and the practical conditions facing operators, investors and consumers.

Infrastructure stops at the border

Asonga described one of the region’s most persistent connectivity problems as “no man’s land”: the physical and regulatory gaps encountered when infrastructure reaches a national border.

A fibre network may extend to the edge of one country without connecting seamlessly to infrastructure on the other side. Operators must navigate separate permits, agencies, technical requirements and commercial agreements before completing what may be a relatively short cross-border link.

“Regulators have not yet aligned their frameworks sufficiently to make it easy for service providers to build infrastructure from one country into another,” Asonga said.

The effect is both technical and economic. Networks take longer to deploy, costs rise, and operators may decide that cross-border routes are not commercially viable.

Landlocked countries are particularly exposed. They depend on terrestrial corridors through neighbouring states to reach submarine cable landing stations. Every additional licence, fee and administrative delay increases the cost of international capacity.

The World Bank has identified authorisation and licensing restrictions, expensive access to existing infrastructure, inconsistent rights-of-way rules, duplicated construction and weak cross-border coordination as barriers to West Africa’s digital infrastructure market. These obstacles can make it easier for an operator to purchase international capacity routed through Europe than to establish a direct connection with a neighbouring African market.

The roaming test

Consumers experience the same fragmentation through roaming charges.

Rudman recalled travelling from Nigeria to another African country where the same mobile network group operates. A local Nigerian call costing approximately N10 or N11 per minute increased to roughly N300 per minute while roaming.

“The roaming rate was about 30 times the local cost, and it was the same network – not a different network,” he said.

The example captures the distance between regional ambition and consumer experience. A West African should be able to cross a border without being effectively disconnected by the cost of communications.

ECOWAS adopted a regional roaming regulation in 2017, but implementation has been uneven. By February 2026, more than half of ECOWAS member states had implemented at least one bilateral roaming agreement. The commission was still reviewing implementation gaps and developing stronger monitoring guidelines. 

Bilateral agreements are progress, but they do not amount to a fully functioning regional framework. Consumers face different conditions depending on the countries involved, their operator and the status of individual agreements.

ECOWAS also adopted a revised regulation on roaming across public mobile communications networks in 2026, reflecting the continuing effort to translate regional policy into consistent national practice. 

The  test now is not the number of regulations approved. It is whether travellers and businesses experience predictable prices and uninterrupted service across all participating markets.

Africa’s traffic still travels abroad

Fragmented regulation also shapes how internet traffic moves.

Rudman said African operators must do more to keep locally generated traffic within the continent. Large operators with abundant international submarine capacity may have little financial incentive to route traffic through domestic or regional internet exchange points.

This means traffic between African networks can leave the continent before returning, increasing latency and consuming international capacity unnecessarily.

The problem is rooted partly in infrastructure design. Early submarine cable systems were built primarily to connect African markets with Europe, where much of the internet’s content and computing capacity was located.

New cables provide more opportunities for direct African interconnection, but the capacity available between neighbouring countries may still be considerably lower than that available on routes to Europe.

Rudman said governments should use landing approvals, licensing frameworks and infrastructure policies to encourage stronger intra-African connectivity. Terrestrial operators must also build the missing links between national backbones.

The objective should not be to isolate African networks from the global internet. It should be to make local and regional routing the fastest and most economical option when traffic originates and terminates within Africa.

Capital is available but projects remain difficult

Closing cross-border gaps requires investment, but Nurshaikhova argued that capital is not the only constraint.

“There is a market failure in middle-mile connectivity, rural connectivity and cross-border connectivity,” she said. “The problem is not simply the availability of capital.”

Investors also need predictable regulation, clear commercial rules, credible demand and protection against political and security risks.

Development finance institutions can provide catalytic funding, guarantees and blended-finance structures to reduce risk and attract private capital. They can also use their convening power to bring governments, regulators and operators into common implementation frameworks.

Nurshaikhova cited Nigeria’s proposed 90,000km BRIDGE fibre network, which is intended to connect local government areas and wards through a wholesale open-access structure.

Although designed as a national network, BRIDGE could also support regional corridors by linking landlocked neighbours such as Burkina Faso to Nigeria’s submarine cable capacity.

The Western Africa Regional Digital Integration Program similarly combines physical infrastructure with regulatory reforms intended to promote open access, infrastructure sharing and regional cooperation.

These projects acknowledge a basic reality: cross-border fibre cannot be financed as if it were purely a construction project. Its commercial viability depends on several governments agreeing on how the infrastructure will be licensed, accessed, protected and priced.

Satellite will not remove the need for cooperation

Satellite services offer another way to reach underserved or difficult locations, but Oyagbola cautioned against viewing them as replacements for regional terrestrial infrastructure.

Low-Earth-orbit satellites can connect remote communities, provide backup during fibre cuts and create redundancy. However, satellite operators still need ground stations, spectrum approvals, data centres and fibre links to carry traffic into national and international networks.

Regulators must also determine whether direct-to-device satellite providers will receive their own mobile licences or operate through partnerships with existing telecommunications companies.

If each West African country develops a different licensing regime for the same satellite service, the region risks reproducing its terrestrial fragmentation in orbit.

Rebecchi described satellite as an access road and fibre as the superhighway into which it eventually feeds.

Satellite connectivity may help establish demand in locations where fibre is not initially economical. As usage grows, operators may gain a commercial basis for extending terrestrial networks.

That progression will be more attractive to investors if the new network can serve a regional market rather than a small national customer base.

A deadline for integration

West and Central African governments committed in the 2025 Cotonou Declaration to building a single African digital market by 2030.

Their interim targets for 2028 include harmonising roaming tariffs, interconnecting national backbones, deploying regional internet exchange points, reducing the average cost of data by half and establishing interoperable payment systems in 15 countries.

Those commitments provide a useful direction, but governments have made regional integration promises before.

Rudman compared the slow progress on digital integration with ECOWAS’s decades-long discussion of a single currency. He also noted the difficulty of travelling between some West African capitals, with passengers sometimes connecting through East Africa or Europe to reach another country in their own region.

The digital market risks following the same pattern: strong political declarations accompanied by slow national implementation.

Avoiding that outcome will require practical reforms.

ECOWAS and national regulators should establish common templates for cross-border fibre licences, standardise rights-of-way procedures and create binding timelines for approvals. Operators should be able to obtain regional or mutually recognised authorisations instead of starting from the beginning in every country.

Governments should publish infrastructure maps and require fair access to publicly supported fibre. Regulators should develop consistent rules for infrastructure sharing, open-access pricing, spectrum coordination and satellite licensing.

Regional institutions must also monitor outcomes rather than announcements. Measures should include the number of interconnected national backbones, wholesale prices on cross-border routes, roaming costs, approval times, network outages and the percentage of regional traffic exchanged within Africa.

Development finance should be linked to regulatory implementation. Governments seeking concessional funding for regional infrastructure should demonstrate that the necessary licences, access agreements and cross-border protections are already in place.

Private operators also have responsibilities. They must participate in local internet exchange points, offer commercially reasonable wholesale access and treat regional interconnection as a growth opportunity rather than a threat to existing transit revenue.

The economic case is substantial. The World Bank estimates that deeper liberalisation of telecommunications, financial, transport and professional services could increase services trade within the African Continental Free Trade Area by between 60% and 64% by 2035. 

A functioning West African digital market would give infrastructure investors access to a larger customer base, reduce duplication and improve the economics of serving smaller and landlocked countries.

But a single digital market cannot be built through fibre alone. It requires governments to remove the regulatory borders that remain long after physical cables reach the frontier.