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Africa Digital Sovereignty Framework Download

Executive Summary

Africa's digital economy is on a trajectory that will define the continent's economic and political agency for a generation. Internet penetration stands at 38% against a global average of 68%, meaning the largest wave of adoption is still ahead. Yet the infrastructure that will carry this wave, specifically cloud platforms, data centres, subsea cable networks, and key software layers, remains overwhelmingly controlled by a small set of external actors.

This concentration of infrastructure seems to br the outcome of timing, investment scale, and network effects that accumulated before African markets reached sufficient scale to attract domestic alternatives. But the result is the same: dependency that limits bargaining power, resilience, and ultimately sovereignty.

This paper argues that the defining governance challenge for African digital policymakers in 2026 is not whether to adopt digital infrastructure (adoption is inevitable and desirable) but how to govern the terms of that adoption. The window to establish the rules of engagement is narrowing as adoption accelerates. Regulators who wait until scale creates crisis will have far less leverage than those who act now.