A conversation with Lacina Koné, Director General of Smart Africa
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Africa has near-universal mobile broadband coverage, yet barely a quarter of the population uses the internet. What explains such heavy investment in coverage while usage has been insufficiently addressed?
For more than a decade, Africa’s connectivity agenda was measured primarily by coverage: how many towers were built, how many communities were reached, and how much of the population lived within range of a signal. That focus was necessary. Without infrastructure, there can be no digital economy.
But coverage was always a foundation, not the final objective. Our challenge today is that millions of Africans live within reach of mobile broadband and still cannot use it meaningfully. That gap is driven by affordability, relevance, and capability: the cost of smartphones, the price of data relative to household income, limited digital literacy, and the shortage of useful services and content in African languages.
Satellite connectivity has an important role to play, especially in remote areas where terrestrial networks remain commercially difficult. But satellites alone will not, by themselves, close the usage gap. Africa must now give equal priority to affordable devices, digital skills, locally relevant content, trusted digital public services, and financing models that make connectivity useful and sustainable for households.
The next measure of success cannot simply be whether a signal is available. It must be whether an African citizen can afford to connect, has the skills capability to participate, and can translate that connection into opportunity.
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LEO constellations operate with very few ground-based assets, largely outside conventional regulatory mechanisms – licensing, data localization, taxation. Faced with operators that are physically absent, what leverage do African states really have left?
This is where African agency matters. A single regulator negotiating alone with a global satellite operator has limited weight; the operator can simply deprioritise that market. Fifty-plus regulators negotiating from a common, harmonised framework is a different proposition. It turns national authority into collective leverage and gives Africa the ability to shape the terms under which satellite connectivity serves its people and markets.
Concretely, the tools remain available: market access is not automatic, and it can be made conditional. Landing rights and spectrum authorisation are sovereign decisions. Local gateway requirements can support national security, resilience, lawful access, traffic -management, and quality-of-service objectives, even if they do not automatically determine the full routing of all traffic. Licences can be tied to Universal Service Fund contributions, coverage commitments for schools, clinics, and emergency communications, and basic tax presence. None of this requires an operator to have a large physical footprint. It requires African states to agree, at the regional level, on a common floor that prevents operator’s one country’s light-touch regime from being played against a neighbour’s stricter one.
This is why Smart Africa’s work on harmonising Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Non-Geostationary Satellite Orbit (NGSO) regulatory frameworks runs deliberately through the Regional Economic Communities (RECs): ECOWAS, CEMAC, SADC, EAC, IGAD, and AICTO, A harmonised regional licensing regime, backed by common data-governance and security standards, converts today’s scattered leverage into a coherent negotiating position.
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Europe is building its own satellite capability through IRIS² and Eutelsat. Our report “Telecoms Offshored – The strategic challenge of satellite internet for African economies” suggests Africa will also need its own infrastructure in the medium term. How can the continent achieve space and connectivity sovereignty?
Sovereignty here should not be understood as isolationism or state control. Africa is not going to replicate a multi-constellation Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network on its own timeline or budget, and it should not try to. In Smart Africa’s reading, sovereignty means retaining the capacity to set the rules, capture a fair share of the value created by African traffic, and build the domestic capability to participate in the industry rather than only consume it.
That begins with the regulatory foundation: a coordinated African position going into WRC-27 on spectrum access and orbital resources, so the continent negotiates as a bloc rather than ceding priority by default. This is fundamental to our ongoing work with major stakeholders such as the African Telecommunications Union and the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) on the WRC-27 preparatory process.
Beyond spectrum, sovereignty requires deliberate industrial policy: procurement and licensing conditions that encourage technology transfer, local content, and African participation rather than leaving the continent as a distribution market. The objective should not be to keep global satellite operators out. It should be to ensure that their entry expands African enterprise rather than bypassing it. Every new layer of connectivity should create room for African telecom operators, infrastructure companies, engineers, data centres, fintechs, device-financing firms, service providers, content providers, universities, space-technology ventures, researchers, and investors to participate in the value chain.
It also requires investment in ground infrastructure, teleports, and backhaul that African operators and governments own or co-own, alongside sustained investment in engineering, spectrum-management, and space-law skills. The aim is to ensure that the continent is not permanently dependent on foreign expertise to regulate or operate what it hosts.
IRIS² is a useful reference point because it shows sovereignty being built through regional pooling. A single European state could not have justified that investment alone, and no single African Member State will build meaningful satellite capability alone either. This has to be a continental undertaking, coordinated through Smart Africa, the African Union Commission (AUC), RASCOM, and the Regional Economic Communities (RECs).
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Our report proposes treating satellite operators as full telecom operators – local gateways, harmonized regional licensing, and market access conditioned on technology transfer. What should the priority action be?
Sequencing matters. Local gateway mandates and technology-transfer conditions are the right long-term instruments, but they only work if they are backed by collective negociation power, and that power comes from harmonised regional licensing. If gateways and technology-transfer conditions are pursued country by country before harmonisation, operators will simply route around the toughest jurisdictions and concentrate investment where the terms are more flexible. For Smart Africa, the priority is therefore to lock in harmonised LEO and NGSO regulatory frameworks across the Regional Economic Communities first, on an accelerated timeline.
That is the work Smart Africa has already planned and begun: a landscape review of existing national and regional frameworks, technical working groups with regulators and the RECs, and structured validation processes designed to produce a common regulatory baseline. The baseline will cover licensing, gateway requirements, security and lawful-interception standards, and Universal Service Fund style national-interest conditions that Member States can adopt with minimal friction. Once that baseline exists, conditioning deeper market access on technology transfer and local investment becomes enforceable, because operators are negotiating against a unified continental position rather than the weakest link in it.
We should be realistic about the complexity of this work. Harmonising the positions of sovereign regulators and Regional Economic Communities will not happen through declarations alone. It requires technical preparation, political trust, and a regulatory baseline that Member States can adopt without surrendering their national responsibilities. Harmonising Regional Economic Communities, Africa expanded largely. But the next frontier, meaningful access, fair value capture, and digital, addressed. Otherwise, addressed on African terms.
But the direction must be unequivocal. Africa should welcome satellite innovation, while negotiating its terms from a position of collective strength. Our objective is not isolation. It is agency and participation: African participation in the infrastructure, the skills, the investment, the governance, and the value created by African demand.
Africa expanded connectivity largely through national markets. The next frontier, meaningful access, fair value capture, and digital sovereignty, must be built regionally and continentally. Otherwise, it will be built for Africa, but not sufficiently with Africa.
