Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to find that your phone has no signal.
By Barbara Asafu Adjaye, head of TMT and industrials at Absa Bank Ghana (CIB), and Kabo Nkoana, senior coverage banker: pan-African TMT and industrials at Absa Bank South Africa
You restart it, switch between mobile data and WiFi, and try again, assuming it is a temporary fault, only to find that your morning social scroll over a cup of coffee never happens, messages stop coming through, calls won’t connect, emails never arrive, payments can’t be made, customers can’t reach your business, and as the hours pass what began as a minor inconvenience slowly turns into a day that no longer resembles the one you had planned.
It is an uncomfortable thought, partly because it feels so improbable, but also because it reveals just how much of modern life now rests on the assumption that a connection will always be there.
There is, however, an important distinction between temporarily losing access to something and never having had access to it in the first place, which, for more than 60% of people living in Africa, is an everyday reality with profound economic implications for inclusion and productivity in a world built around digital connectivity.
In its simplest form, the digital divide comes down to four interrelated factors: whether people can afford the data, whether they own a device capable of connecting, whether the quality of that connection is good enough to use consistently and, perhaps most fundamentally, whether the underlying digital infrastructure exists to support it all. Affordability is arguably the clearest expression of that infrastructure gap, with most countries across sub-Saharan Africa still falling short of the ITU and UNESCO Broadband Commission’s entry-level affordability target of broadband services costing no more than 2% of monthly GNI per capita.
That is perhaps unsurprising when one considers that most telecommunications investment across Africa is driven by the private sector, with a handful of large multinationals accounting for around 75% of the capital deployed. Commercial incentives naturally draw that investment towards markets where population density and income levels offer stronger returns, which is why middle-mile infrastructure tends to cluster around major urban centres and regional hubs while underserved areas are left with a far weaker investment case.
Digital infrastructure is built to operate over decades, gradually producing predictable cash flows as networks mature and utilisation grows, but the capital available to fund that infrastructure is too often shorter-term and fragmented around individual transactions over the assets themselves.
The result is a mismatch that constrains scale, raises refinancing risk, and slows the development of the platforms upon which wider digital economies depend.
Addressing this means moving beyond transactional lending towards platform-led financing, aligning the tenor and structure of capital with the life of the underlying assets, viewing digital infrastructure as interconnected platforms rather than isolated projects, and using credit enhancement together with risk-sharing mechanisms to crowd in the investment these platforms require. Once financing begins to mirror the life of the infrastructure, a much broader pool of long-term capital can be mobilised through blended finance that combines development finance with commercial lenders, public-private partnerships that allocate risk to those best placed to manage it, supplier-backed funding that supports deployment over time, and repayment structures that grow alongside platform usage. There is also scope to broaden the financing toolkit through greater use of vendor and equipment-linked funding, revenue-linked financing and sustainability-linked funding, giving investors more flexible ways to participate.
What we at Absa have observed through our conversations with clients across the continent is that long-term capital has not become more selective about Africa so much as more deliberate about the conditions under which it is prepared to invest. Their questions centre on currency volatility, regulatory certainty, energy reliability and the broader policy environment, but these are no longer seen as reasons to step away from opportunities altogether; they are risks that investors expect to understand, price and manage, which is why markets that provide stable policy signals and credible governance attract stronger long-term interest.
Ghana offers an interesting example of what can happen when digital infrastructure becomes an explicit policy priority.
Alongside opening its 5G market to greater competition in an effort to accelerate deployment, the country has embarked on a broader programme of policy reform designed to strengthen the institutions that underpin the digital economy, from telecommunications regulation and data governance to innovation funding and emerging technologies.
It is an acknowledgement that building digital infrastructure is as much about creating the right enabling environment as it is about laying fibre or erecting towers.
The same principle applies across the continent, where the next phase of digital development will depend on how effectively infrastructure platforms are supported over the long term, allowing connectivity to translate into wider participation and stronger economic activity. For institutions and investors, that calls for capital structures that reflect the life of the assets and a sharper focus on the platforms capable of reducing friction across the digital economy.