Africa has worn many labels over the past two decades. In 2000, The Economist called it “The Hopeless Continent.” A decade later came the reversal: “Africa Rising.” By 2013, optimism settled into the more cautious “Aspiring Africa.” Investors paid generously for that promise, especially in technology, fintech, and telecoms, often funding growth narratives long before execution caught up.

Today, Africa is in a different phase. The promise did not fully deliver, not because ambition was lacking, but because the foundations were thinner than assumed. In the digital economy, applications scaled faster than infrastructure. Valuations raced ahead of power, connectivity, compute, and policy readiness. When global capital tightened, the gap between ambition and fundamentals was exposed. Growth without infrastructure proved fragile.

The continent now trades like a distressed asset. Talent is emigrating at scale. Political leadership is pulled between external poles. Confidence has thinned. Yet beneath the surface, a reset is underway. What is emerging is not stagnation but the early stages of a cyclical recovery, one driven not by optimism, but by reform, policy adjustment, and the slow return of macro credibility.

That reset matters far beyond markets. For Africa’s digital infrastructure economy, data centers, fiber, cloud, power, and compute, credibility and capital access are not abstractions. They determine whether infrastructure is financed, built, interconnected, and ultimately used.

From “Africa Rising” to Infrastructure Reality

Africa’s constraint has never been vision. Governments continue to announce broadband plans, cloud strategies, and AI roadmaps. The bottleneck has been execution, particularly where projects are capital-intensive, slow to pay back, and dependent on coordination across power, connectivity, and regulation.

That constraint is easing in parts of the continent. Foreign-exchange reserves are rebuilding across reform-oriented economies. Nigeria’s reserves are around $46 billion, the highest level in almost a decade. Egypt’s have recovered above $50 billion. Ghana’s have more than doubled since its crisis. These shifts improve currency stability and lower the cost of capital – prerequisites for long-cycle infrastructure.

Inflation has eased, allowing central banks in Nigeria, Egypt, and Ghana to begin cutting rates. External market access is reopening, with Eurobond issuance likely to resume in 2026. For infrastructure-heavy sectors, this is good news, as fiber networks and data centers cannot be financed on short-term capital.

Where infrastructure can (not) scale

Nigeria’s improving FX position directly supports digital infrastructure by lowering import costs for equipment and reducing contract risk. Local fiber manufacturing, the national broadband Project Bridge and discounted valuations is likely to restore Nigeria’s investability for long-duration assets, even as fiscal execution remains the key risk.

Egypt’s appeal has always been scale; what was missing was stability. With FX liquidity restored, reserves rebuilt, and the exchange rate more predictable, the country is again investable for long-cycle assets such as hyperscale data centers, subsea landing infrastructure, and regional cloud platforms. Egypt and its north African neighbor, Morocco remain anchor markets in Africa’s digital map. Morocco’s policy discipline and strong reserve position underpin its role as a North-West digital corridor, linking Europe, West Africa, and francophone markets and experts envisage the two will lead Africa’s data center growth.

Ghana’s turnaround shows what disciplined reform can unlock. Inflation has collapsed from crisis levels, the currency has stabilized, and confidence has returned. Infrastructure financing has shifted from survival mode to normalization, allowing long-term capital to re-engage on more rational terms.

South Africa remains a major anchor market, thanks to its institutional depth, liquid capital markets, and regulatory continuity, which continues to support large-scale data centers and cloud on-ramps, despite its weak headline growth. Kenya remains East Africa’s digital gateway, anchored by strong enterprise demand, regional connectivity, and a growing services economy. While fiscal pressures have raised funding costs in recent years, improving macro coordination and sustained private-sector demand continue to support the gradual expansion of data centers, subsea-linked connectivity, and cloud-adjacent infrastructure.

Other markets such as Angola and  Senegal, where fiscal credibility remains fragile face structurally higher capital costs and execution risk. For power-intensive assets like data centers and network infrastructure, macro fragility translates directly into delay, underinvestment, and missed scale.

What (still) holds Africa back

The macro recovery now taking shape across parts of Africa will matter little if the micro foundations remain unaddressed. Nowhere is this clearer than in digital infrastructure.

Africa does not suffer from a lack of wealth so much as a failure of capital formation. The continent is “millionaire-rich” but institutionally poor. Local pension funds, sovereign vehicles, and insurance pools remain largely absent from long-term infrastructure financing, including data centers, fiber networks, and power systems. As a result, foreign capital dominates. Development finance institutions, in turn, are often reluctant to commit meaningful scale without local capital anchoring projects. And the consequence is predictable: higher perceived risk, dollarized returns, and a structurally elevated cost of capital compared with Asia or the Middle East.

This gap shows up clearly in valuations. Africa’s largest telecom operators, including MTN, serve markets comparable in population and growth potential to peers elsewhere, yet trade at persistent discounts in hard-currency terms. The same pattern holds across the digital infrastructure value chain, where African platforms are priced as tactical assets rather than strategic ones. Capital scarcity is not only a financing problem; it is a valuation one.

In some ways, Africa still lacks deep ownership of its policy agenda. Heavy reliance on external expertise persists, often misaligned with local realities and reinforcing legitimacy gaps between governments and citizens. Local talent continues to exit, hollowing out institutional capacity just as execution becomes most critical.

More than three decades ago, the Cameroonian economist Axelle Kabou argued that Africa’s development failures were rooted less in external forces than in internal choices – weak governance, avoidance of accountability, and elite incentives that quietly reward underdevelopment. Her critique remains uncomfortable, but relevant. Digital infrastructure demands discipline: credible policy, patient capital, and institutions capable of execution. Without these, ambition alone will continue to outpace foundations – and fragility will persist.

What needs to be done

If Africa’s current macro reset is to translate into durable growth, the next phase must move decisively from stabilization to execution. For digital infrastructure, that means changing how capital, policy, and institutions interact.

Local capital must be mobilized at scale. Africa’s pension funds, sovereign vehicles, and long-term savings pools remain materially under-allocated to domestic infrastructure. Until local capital anchors projects, foreign investors will continue to price African risk conservatively, keeping funding costs high and project pipelines thin. Countries that have successfully scaled digital infrastructure elsewhere, from the Gulf to Southeast Asia, did so by first aligning domestic capital with national infrastructure priorities.

Policy ownership must deepen. Digital infrastructure cannot be governed as an imported technical agenda. Cloud policy, data localization, power pricing, and right-of-way frameworks must be designed for on-ground execution.

The private sector must also take collective ownership of outcomes. Waiting for short-term political cycles to mandate infrastructure sharing produces stop-start execution and destroys shareholder value. Operators need to aggregate their interests, resolve structural bottlenecks jointly, and engage government as a partner of last resort.

Institutions must become the organizing principle. Data centers, fiber networks, and power systems are long-duration assets that require regulatory stability, predictable tariffs, and enforcement capacity over decades. Where institutions are weak, infrastructure remains fragmented, underutilized, or stranded.

Talent retention is now strategic. As Africa enters a more capital-intensive digital phase – AI, cloud, and compute – the loss of experienced engineers, regulators, and operators imposes a direct execution cost. Infrastructure is built by people, not policy.

Africa does not need more vision. It needs mechanisms that convert capital into assets, assets into services, and services into productivity. That is the work of the next decade, and it will determine whether the continent’s rebound becomes structural or merely cyclical.

A Narrowing Window

Africa enters 2026 in a markedly different position from just a few years ago. Capital will not flow evenly across the continent. It will follow credibility, coordination, and the ability to execute. As a Nigerian proverb reminds us, when the wind blows, what was hidden is revealed. The coming year will expose which reforms are real, which institutions can deliver, and which ambitions were built on fragile ground.

The continent will not remain this cheap indefinitely. For investors and builders willing to lean, the next phase may finally convert ambition into assets – and cyclical recovery into digital and physical infrastructure that endures.