West Africa acts on cable resilience to protect $150bn economy
West African telecom regulators are adopting a coordinated strategy to protect submarine cables after last year's outages paralyzed regional banking and exposed systemic risks to the continent's $150 billion digital economy.
The West Africa Telecommunications Regulators Assembly (WATRA) is translating global guidelines on subsea cable protection into a regional enforcement and coordination strategy. The move responds directly to the widespread cable failures of March 2024, which severed internet access across Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Benin.
For investors and financial institutions, those outages laid bare a critical infrastructure bottleneck. More than 95 percent of international internet traffic travels via submarine cables, and West Africa’s rapidly expanding $150 billion digital economy relies on a narrow corridor of links to Europe. When those cables snapped, banks halted transactions, fintech platforms failed, and airlines ground to a halt.
The risk profile is worsening as capital pours into regional digital infrastructure. A growing pipeline of hyperscale data centres across Nigeria and neighboring markets is driving massive new demand for uninterrupted international connectivity. Aliyu Yusuf Aboki, WATRA’s executive secretary, warned that expanding digital services without hardening the underlying network is a dangerous gamble.
The regional framework draws on recommendations from the International Advisory Body on Submarine Cable Resilience, a joint initiative of the International Telecommunication Union and the International Cable Protection Committee. Rather than leaving resilience to individual telecom operators, WATRA wants governments and regulators to coordinate on faster repair permitting, shared access to repair vessels, and mandatory route diversity.
Because subsea cables serve multiple nations simultaneously, Aboki stressed that no single country can insulate itself from a system-wide shock. “An incident affecting submarine cable infrastructure can simultaneously affect connectivity and economic activity across several countries,” he said. “Our response must therefore combine national action with stronger regional cooperation.”
Nigeria is driving the regional push. The Nigerian Communications Commission elevated cable resilience as a priority immediately after the 2024 crisis, while Bosun Tijani, the minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, co-chaired the global advisory body that produced the new guidelines.
Regulators now face the harder task of turning policy documents into operational realities like emergency drills and redundant cable landings. “The real measure of their success will be the extent to which their recommendations improve preparedness, reduce disruption, accelerate recovery and strengthen the infrastructure supporting our digital economies,” Aboki said.
