AFRICA: Enabling Private Investment into Communications Infrastructure in the ECOWAS Region

The West Africa Region has access to unprecedented Internet capacity coming into the region. Out of the 15 member states of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), 11 have built landing stations on their coasts linking themselves to the undersea or submarine fiber optic cables running from Europe to South Africa. Despite these improvements, much remains to be done to ensure connectivity between and in countries as the submarine cables are currently only benefitting urban centers along the coastline. More terrestrial infrastructure, national fibre backbone, cross-border and last mile connectivity networks will be required for the region to start building a foundation for a single telecom market agenda of the ECOWAS Community. In addition, there are considerable numbers of Africans who need affordable and easy access to roaming services. From the consumers’ point of view, the biggest obstacle to roaming is price; from the operators’ point of view, there is little or no incentive to reduce rates.

In 2016 and 2017, PPIAF provided technical assistance to support the information and communication technologies (ICT) Department at the ECOWAS Commission and to take the first critical steps in improving the regulatory framework to enable private sector investment in cross-border communications infrastructures and services. To do so, two critical studies have been conducted:

(i) A study on harmonization of cross-border communication costs, which identifies reasons why a bigger roaming market has not developed in ECOWAS. The study gives regulatory recommendations and some options in order to increase competition, to foster roaming price reduction and to accelerate market development in the ECOWAS region.

(ii) A study on missing links and alternative infrastructure, which describes existing regional cross-border ICT infrastructures and proposes potential of alternative infrastructure for provision of fibre as well as a regional strategy for the development of broadband in the ECOWAS area.