African countries risk slowing the rollout of cloud infrastructure, data centers, and digital platforms if they pursue fragmented national digital sovereignty strategies instead of coordinated regional systems, speakers warned during a session on The Big African Infrastructure Gap at GITEX Africa in Marrakech. As governments across the continent accelerate efforts to localize data, develop sovereign cloud environments, and build national digital infrastructure stacks, industry leaders said the real constraint facing Africa is not ambition or capital, but coordination. Attempting to replicate full infrastructure ecosystems across dozens of national markets risks weakening project bankability and slowing deployment timelines.
Tantchonta M’Po, Head of Strategic Architecture Consulting at Benin’s Agency for Information Systems and Digital, said digital sovereignty should not be interpreted as requiring every country to independently build all layers of infrastructure.
“Harmonization is key,” he noted, arguing that regional coordination frameworks such as ECOWAS could support shared infrastructure platforms across countries with aligned policies and demand structures. Not all markets, he said, need to develop standalone data center ecosystems if regional alternatives can deliver trusted hosting capacity more efficiently.
Speakers emphasized that the continent’s infrastructure gap is not primarily a financing challenge. Ilias Djouai, Vice President of Investments at the Africa Finance Corporation, said Africa faces an estimated $100 billion digital infrastructure shortfall, despite the presence of roughly $500 billion in pension fund assets and close to $2 trillion in banking-sector capital across the continent.
“What is missing is not capital,” he said. “What is missing are bankable projects.”
Fragmented regulatory frameworks continue to slow infrastructure deployment across multiple markets simultaneously. Companies attempting cross-border expansion often face licensing misalignment and compliance complexity that limit scale economies for digital infrastructure investments.
Driss Aquachar, Vice President at Mastercard’s Customer Solutions Center for North West and Francophone Africa, said the continent’s infrastructure deficit remains widely underestimated. Africa currently hosts between 200 and 300 data centers, compared to more than 11,000 globally, while only about 40% of the population is connected. In some markets, connectivity penetration remains closer to 10%.
He added that regulatory harmonization across markets will be essential to enabling investors to deploy infrastructure platforms that operate at continental scale. Mastercard’s $200 million investment in MTN, he noted, reflects efforts to support interoperable digital capabilities across multiple African markets simultaneously.
Speakers also challenged assumptions that Africa’s infrastructure constraints reflect weak consumer demand. Vivek Mittal, Chief Executive Officer of the Africa Infrastructure Development Association, said usage patterns across the continent demonstrate strong willingness to pay for digital services. The greater challenge lies in building transaction ecosystems that reduce risk and improve project readiness for infrastructure investors.
Examples from emerging compute markets illustrate how coordinated policy can accelerate deployment. Ethiopia’s allocation of approximately 2,000 megawatts of power capacity to bitcoin mining operations demonstrates how infrastructure investment can move quickly when demand signals and revenue models are clearly defined.
Across the discussion, speakers agreed that Africa’s digital sovereignty agenda will depend less on building parallel national systems and more on coordinating infrastructure planning across borders. Regional demand aggregation, regulatory alignment, and shared execution frameworks are likely to determine whether the continent can translate investor interest into deployable cloud, connectivity, and data center capacity at scale.
