Stronger regulatory alignment across African markets will be essential to unlocking investment in data centers, cloud platforms, and cross-border digital services, speakers said during the closing fireside session at GITEX Africa in Marrakech, where policymakers and investors described coordination – rather than capital – as the continent’s remaining infrastructure constraint.
Dr. Mactar Seck, Head of Innovation and Technology at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), said Africa’s digital sovereignty ambitions will depend on whether countries move beyond national policy frameworks toward subregional and continental implementation structures.
“African countries don’t work enough together,” he said, noting that while 44 countries now have data protection regulations and 30 have established data protection authorities, these frameworks remain fragmented and unevenly enforced across markets.
He emphasized that digital sovereignty should not be interpreted as requiring every country to build standalone infrastructure stacks. Instead, subregional cooperation models can support shared data center ecosystems, cross-border digital platforms, and interoperable regulatory environments.
Political commitment, he argued, will determine whether these coordination frameworks succeed. Existing regional initiatives already demonstrate what alignment can achieve. The Southern African Development Community (SADC)has made progress on regulatory harmonization, ECOWAS has advanced cybersecurity coordination in several areas, and East African countries are increasingly sharing infrastructure across borders. At the continental level, the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol provides a pathway toward harmonized regulation in areas such as payments and artificial intelligence governance.
Dr. Seck also pointed to recent cross-border payment cooperation between Rwanda and Kenya as evidence that practical regulatory alignment is already emerging in parts of the continent. Expanding these frameworks, he said, will require open regulatory environments that support private-sector participation, improve access to data, and strengthen institutional capacity across markets.
Antonia Maier, Regional Head for Telecommunications, Media and Technology at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), said regulatory cohesion directly affects how investors evaluate African digital infrastructure opportunities.
“A market of 1.4 billion people is far more attractive than a collection of fragmented national markets,” she said, noting that infrastructure platforms designed to serve multiple countries are increasingly central to investment strategies.
She added that while governments will continue to localize sensitive datasets such as financial and identity information, most future data center deployments are likely to operate as regional infrastructure serving multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
Maier pointed to Egypt as an example of both opportunity and constraint. Despite its strong subsea connectivity links to the Gulf and the United States and its advanced fintech ecosystem, the country’s installed data center capacity remains below 40 MW for a population of roughly 100 million. She said institutions such as the EBRD are working with private-sector partners to identify and address regulatory and infrastructure bottlenecks slowing expansion.
Across the discussion, speakers agreed that Africa’s next phase of digital infrastructure growth will depend less on national policy announcements and more on sustained progress toward regulatory interoperability. Without stronger continental coordination frameworks, they warned, efforts to expand cloud infrastructure, data localization capacity, and AI-ready compute ecosystems will continue to face structural deployment constraints.
