As Rwanda hosted global telecommunications leaders last month, the continent continues to confront fundamental questions about infrastructure, sovereignty and who will control its digital future
KIGALI, Rwanda—When telecommunications executives and African policymakers gathered here last month for the Mobile World Congress, the rhetoric was predictably optimistic. Technology would transform economies. Connectivity would lift millions from poverty. Artificial intelligence would leapfrog legacy infrastructure challenges.
Yet beneath the carefully choreographed presentations at the Kigali Convention Centre lay more uncomfortable questions about whether Africa can genuinely shape its own digital destiny—or whether it risks becoming, once again, a market for technologies designed, controlled and monetised elsewhere.
President Paul Kagame, in his opening address, articulated what has become a common refrain amongst African leaders: the continent must not simply consume imported technologies but build them, govern them and define the terms of their deployment. “We cannot wait for the future to arrive,” he said. “We must shape it.”
The question is how. And at what cost.
The infrastructure puzzle
The challenge begins with basic connectivity. Whilst mobile penetration has grown dramatically across Africa over the past decade, meaningful internet access remains elusive for hundreds of millions. The economics are daunting: sparse population density in rural areas, low average revenue per user and the substantial capital requirements for building networks create a difficult equation for telecommunications companies.
Ralph Mupita, chief executive of MTN Group, outlined his company’s investments in fifth-generation wireless networks and digital services platforms across its African markets. Sunil Taldar of Airtel Africa and Yasser Shaker of Orange Middle East & Africa offered similar commitments. Yet all three executives operate under pressure from shareholders to demonstrate returns, creating an inherent tension between expansion imperatives and profitability demands.
The public-private partnerships that Rwanda’s ICT minister Paula Ingabire emphasised as crucial to bridging the digital divide often translate, in practice, to governments subsidising network buildouts whilst private operators capture the upside. This model has worked in some markets. In others, it has resulted in public expenditure with limited social return.
The sovereignty question
More complex still is the matter of digital sovereignty. African nations increasingly recognise that data governance, artificial intelligence frameworks and digital identity systems carry profound implications for economic independence and national security. Yet they lack the technical capacity, regulatory expertise and often the political leverage to negotiate favourable terms with multinational technology companies.
Conference discussions on artificial intelligence for African applications—in agriculture, healthcare, education—revealed the core tension. The algorithms require vast datasets for training. The computational power demands significant infrastructure. The expertise concentrates in a handful of global technology centres. Africa provides the data and the market; others provide the technology and capture the value.
Doreen Bogdan-Martin, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, addressed these disparities in her remarks, calling for regulatory frameworks that protect data rights whilst encouraging investment. The circle is difficult to square. Stringent data localisation requirements may protect sovereignty but discourage the very capital flows needed to build capacity.
Rwanda’s calculated gamble
Rwanda has positioned itself aggressively as a technology hub, investing in business-friendly regulations, modern conference facilities and symbolic gestures like hosting events such as this one. The country competes with Kenya’s more established technology ecosystem, South Africa’s deeper capital markets and Nigeria’s vast domestic market.
The strategy carries risks. Small nations that orient their economies around serving as gateways or hubs depend heavily on maintaining favourable perceptions amongst international investors. Regulatory changes elsewhere, shifts in geopolitical alignments or simply the emergence of more attractive alternatives can quickly erode carefully cultivated advantages.
President Kagame’s government has demonstrated remarkable discipline in execution. Whether Rwanda’s model proves sustainable or scalable to larger, more complex African nations remains uncertain.
Fintech’s double edge
Mobile money and digital financial services emerged as a recurring theme throughout the conference, presented as an unambiguous success story. Africa’s fintech sector has indeed achieved remarkable penetration, with mobile money transactions in some markets exceeding traditional banking.
Yet this success raises questions of its own. Telecommunications companies have become de facto financial intermediaries, operating with lighter regulatory oversight than traditional banks whilst handling transactions that represent significant portions of many users’ economic lives. The concentration of financial services within telecommunications oligopolies creates systemic vulnerabilities.
Cross-border payment systems, digital identity platforms and small-business lending tools offer genuine utility. They also generate extraordinary data about economic behaviour, consumption patterns and social networks—information of considerable value to both commercial and governmental actors. Who owns this data, how it may be used and what recourse individuals have remains largely unresolved.
The agency problem
GSMA Director-General Vivek Badrinath described the Kigali gathering as an opportunity to ask “What’s next?” in connectivity and emerging technologies. The more fundamental question is “What’s next for whom?”
African nations possess limited leverage in global technology governance discussions. They participate in standards-setting bodies but rarely drive outcomes. They negotiate with multinational corporations but often from positions of weakness, needing investment more than companies need any single market.
The continent’s youth, growing middle class and increasing urbanisation create genuine opportunities. Mobile technology has delivered real improvements in financial inclusion, access to information and economic coordination. These gains merit recognition.
Yet technology alone cannot resolve underlying challenges of governance, education systems, physical infrastructure and institutional capacity. The risk is that digital transformation becomes another development narrative—compelling in theory, disappointing in execution, enriching a narrow elite whilst leaving structural inequalities largely intact.
What Success Requires
Meaningful digital transformation in Africa would require several uncomfortable adjustments. African governments would need to invest far more in technical education, even as immediate political pressures push spending towards consumption rather than capacity building. They would need to develop sophisticated regulatory capabilities, resisting both the urge to impose burdensome restrictions and the temptation to grant sweetheart deals to favoured companies.
Telecommunications companies would need to accept that genuinely bridging the digital divide means serving unprofitable customers and geographies—a proposition that conflicts with their fiduciary duties to shareholders absent regulatory requirements or subsidies.
International technology companies would need to engage with African partners as genuine collaborators rather than simply markets to penetrate, accepting technology transfer, local capacity building and data governance requirements that may limit their operational flexibility and profit margins.
None of these adjustments appears imminent. Which suggests that whilst conferences like this one will continue to generate optimistic projections and partnership announcements, the fundamental dynamics shaping Africa’s digital trajectory remain largely unchanged.
The future, President Kagame urged his audience to shape, rather than wait for, will likely arrive through the same channels it always has—determined by those with capital, technology and leverage, adapted at the margins by those without.
By Napoleon Mugenzi. The author attended the Mobile World Congress Kigali 2025 as an observer.
