Africa's digital transformation is accelerating, but inclusion remains uneven. While there has been a lot of progress, only about 38 of its population was online in 2024 , compared with 68 globally . Rural areas especially lag: just 23 of rural Africans used the internet in 2024 , versus 57 in urban areas , marking one of the world's widest urban-rural gaps.
The central challenge is no longer about ambition, but about scale: connecting the unconnected, strengthening backbone infrastructure, and ensuring that digital economies grow in ways that leave no region or community behind. At this scale, fragmented infrastructure simply won't cut it.
Shared infrastructure is emerging as one of the most effective pathways forward. In practice, this could take the form of tower sharing, fibre backbone collaborations, shared data centres and cloud resources, or spectrum sharing models. Rather than duplicating costly assets, operators and governments are increasingly turning to models that pool resources, reduce deployment costs, and open new investment channels. Its about leveraging collective assets to overcome both physical and economic barriers.
