Strategic Insights to Accelerate Your Business Growth

Open access has long underpinned Africa’s connectivity growth, enabling affordable and efficient use of shared digital infrastructure. Today, the model is being reconsidered as operators consolidate assets, operating costs—especially energy—continue to rise, regulatory scrutiny increases, and cross‑sector ecosystems spanning fibre, power, data centres and edge become more complex. 

This session explores whether open access can still deliver on its original promise. We’ll examine how shifting industry structures, regulatory and commercial pressures, and wider economic challenges are reshaping multi‑tenant approaches and the future of shared infrastructure across the continent.

Energy remains one of the biggest operational costs for digital infrastructure operators, from towers to data centres, with fuel and generation expenses rising sharply in recent years. Grid reliability challenges and connection delays continue to slow the rollout of towers, fibre networks, and new data centre capacity. 

This roundtable brings together leaders from across the energy and digital infrastructure ecosystem to discuss how organizations are managing power today, what drives decisions to outsource versus manage energy internally, and what successful energy partnerships now look like in a shifting operational and regulatory environment.