What did 2024 bring for West African connectivity?
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In the first half of 2024 at least, West African connectivity and telecoms focused on one big issue: the failure of various subsea cables serving the region. Affected cables included the WACS, MainOne, SAT3 and ACE systems - the latter being the sole subsea link for several West African countries. Together, the four affected cables handled the majority of West Africa’s subsea connectivity, so their outage caused numerous connectivity issues in the region.
The subsequent reaction to not just patch up the lost connectivity but to build in system resilience to ensure future incidents would affect uptime as minimally as possible. This resulted in improved satellite connectivity across West Africa, including new licences for Starlink and other systems – as well as increased capacity on Google’s Equiano cable, which was unaffected.
But the 2024 story for West African connectivity focused on more than just firefighting. Data centre buildout, particularly in Nigeria, has accelerated rapidly since the second half of 2024, and wireless traffic has continued to grow, helped by the long-overdue rollout of various roaming agreements. The arrival of 2Africa has also helped drive up fibre performance, as has work on large-scale backbone networks, specifically in Nigeria and Senegal.
Market drivers in 2025
Data centres
Data centre construction has taken off since the last edition of this guide was published in 2024. Nigeria is the centre of the region’s data centre buildouts, with several high-megawatt facilities coming on stream in early 2025, and there are notable new facilities in Ghana, Senegal and Gabon to name a few. The AI revolution brings particular promise for the African data centre market, with potential to import Africa-specific workloads from European data centres.
Roaming
While the Economic Community of West African State (ECOWAS) launched a roaming initiative in 2016, progress had been limited. However, this has started to change of late. After a Senegal-Mauritania agreement in 2023, Ghana, Togo and Benin signed an agreement in October 2024 to allow free voice and SMS roaming for 30 days. Now, Liberia, the Gambia and Sierra Leone followed suit in 2025 with a roaming agreement covering data as well, benefiting 16 million users in total and driving traffic growth.
Network resilience
Following the well-publicised subsea cable outages that sent much of West Africa’s internet and communications networks dark, the region’s countries responded by urgently diversifying, particularly into satellite. Ghana rushed through approval of Starlink to help combat the cuts, and CMC Networks also rapidly deployed satellite connectivity via LEO, MEO and GEO to affected countries. The lesson? Redundancy is urgently needed.
Fibre buildouts
Since the development of the intra-regional Djoliba backbone in 2021, fibre development in West Africa has kept a relatively low profile. However, there are several large fibre projects underway or in the planning phase, including a 90,000 km addition to Nigeria’s network and other projects in Gabon, Cameroon and other markets.
Subsea developments
West Africa’s subsea provision came under the microscope in 2024 when multiple cables went dark simultaneously, and the industry is responding with new developments. Aside from the 2Africa system, which landed in various West African cities across 2024, there are new systems planned to serve Cape Verde and notably Gabon with the Medusa Africa extension.