Mr. Lacina Koné the CEO & Director General of Smart Africa is seeking to raise $2.1 Billion USD for the Deployment of Regional Multi-Tenant Green Data Centres & Cloud Infrastructure in some selected Smart Africa Member States.
Smart Africa seeking to raise about $2.1 Billion United State Dollars for the deployment of regional carrierneutral and multi-tenant Green Data Centres & Cloud Infrastructure in some selected Smart Africa Member States as part of its Data Centre and Cloud for Africa Project. Data Centres in Africa require reduction in power and cooling; increased server and storage utilization and improvement in data centre space. A Green Data Center has mechanical, lighting, electrical and computing systems designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact. Smart Africa targets to achieved through grants, partnership investments and other forms of funding and financing schemes available within the African and the global market. Smart Africa is an alliance of 32 African countries, international organizations and global private sector players tasked with Africa’s digital agenda. The alliance is empowered by a bold and innovative commitment by African Heads of State to accelerate sustainable socio-economic development on the continent and usher Africa into knowledge-based economy through affordable access to broadband and the use of ICT. It’s vision is to transform Africa into a single digital market.
The role of Data Centres and Cloud infrastructure plays a very crucial role in the digital transformation agenda of Africa. And the 2021 Africa Data Centre Association market report shows that, Africa accounts for less than 1% of the multi-tenant data centre capacity globally. This is however projected to grow significantly (25%) by 2023 considering the various initiatives across the continent towards increasing the footprints of carrier -neutral and multi-tenant data centres within the continent. As part of efforts to accelerate this increase, Smart Africa launched the Data Centre and Cloud for Africa Project under the flagship of the Republic of Djibouti .The strategic objectives of the project is to accelerate and increase the global footprint of the multi-tenant data centre located in Africa; to provide the required data centre & cloud resources located in Africa to host the content accessed and consumed by African; to reduce the cost of accessing services content and broadband services within Africa; to enhance the implementation of regional and continental cybersecurity, data governance and data protection policies and regulations and to maximize the socio-economic benefits associated to the data economy and digital transformation of Africa to the benefit of the continent and its citizens.
A project working group consisting of the Smart Africa Member States, Smart Africa Partner Organizations and Private Sector Members have been inaugurated and working together to achieve these strategic objectives of the project. Commenting on the initiative, the CEO and Director General of Smart Africa, Mr. Lacina Koné indicated….“Our(Smart Africa) DNA is called pragmatism. We don’t just push paper and hope that it will work. Because the reality of the matter today is, you cannot continue doing the same thing and expecting a different result”.
In other words, Smart Africa go beyond just supporting the development of blueprints, strategy and policy guidance for Smart Africa Member States but also work with the relevant stakeholders for the implementation of projects through pilot projects and scale-up projects within Smart Africa Member States. He has therefore called on all stakeholders to join hands in collaborating and supporting the initiatives of Smart Africa.
Mr. Lacina Koné, CEO & Director General, Smart Africa
