The Democratic Republic of Congo has announced the most ambitious digital infrastructure programme in sub-Saharan Africa’s history. The headline number — €8 billion over five years — is designed to impress. The structural questions behind it are more important than the number itself.
The Financing Gap
The DRC’s National Digital Plan 2026–2030 commits €8 billion in digital infrastructure spending: fibre networks, telecom towers, data centres, a new submarine cable, and a national AI programme. The connectivity gap it targets is real. At the start of 2025, 77 million Congolese — nearly 70% of a population of over 111 million — had no internet access, according to DataReportal. Only 5,150 mobile towers serve a country roughly the size of Western Europe.
What is not being discussed prominently enough is the arithmetic. Of the €8 billion committed, the DRC government has confirmed financing for approximately $1.5 billion: $1 billion in domestic public funds pledged over five years, and $500 million in international commitments — principally a joint tranche from the World Bank and Agence Française de Développement announced in February 2026. The World Bank’s broader DRC commitment of $1.9 billion includes $400 million earmarked for digital. The EU has pledged €100 million through the Global Gateway mechanism.
That leaves a financing gap of roughly €6.5 billion — approximately 81% of the total plan — unfunded and unannounced.
The pipeline is plausible in outline. EU Global Gateway has unlocked €972 million in blended operations and guarantees with the AfDB for African infrastructure broadly. Afreximbank and EIB have financed DRC digital projects previously. A $1 billion memorandum of understanding with General Technologies has been announced — but not finalised. The critical distinction the plan’s proponents have not drawn clearly is between confirmed commitments and announced ambitions. As of March 2026, the confirmed figure is $1.5 billion. Everything else is a pipeline that has not yet moved to term sheets.
The 5,000-Tower-Per-Year Question
The tower buildout target is the plan’s most structurally demanding requirement. Expanding from 5,150 towers to 30,000 in five years means adding approximately 5,000 towers per year — consistently, across one of the most logistically challenging geographies on the continent. The DRC has no functional national road network. Building a tower in rural Kivu is not comparable to building one in Lagos.
For context: Nigeria has the most developed tower market in sub-Saharan Africa, with 39,880 towers at end-2024 — a base built over 25 years by IHS Towers, American Tower, and operator-owned infrastructure. Nigeria’s net annual tower additions have run at approximately 1,500 to 2,000 sites per year. The DRC’s plan requires doing 2.5 to 3 times that pace, from a far smaller base, across a country four times Nigeria’s size.
Helios Towers, the only independent towerco with a meaningful DRC presence, entered the market in 2011 and reached 1,819 towers by 2018 — roughly 200 per year through acquisitions and build-to-suit additions. Vodacom and Orange have announced a rural towerco joint venture targeting 2,000 solar-powered base stations over six years: meaningful, but 333 sites per year. Five thousand per year is not impossible. But it requires capital mobilisation and operational execution that has not been demonstrated at this pace anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
UIL: The Story Within the Story
The plan’s most scrutinised element is the $150 million deal signed on October 20, 2025 between the DRC government and United Investment LMT (UIL), a Mauritius-based investment firm. The scope of the agreement is extraordinary: 60,000 to 80,000 kilometres of fibre-optic network nationwide, a new 192-terabit-per-second submarine cable, three data centres including a Tier 3 facility in Kinshasa, and the establishment of a national telecom operator. The partnership was first agreed in 2023; supplementary documents were signed last October.
The problem is the math. Deploying 80,000 kilometres of fibre across a country with DRC’s infrastructure deficit, laying an international submarine cable, building three data centres, and standing up a new national telco does not cost $150 million. It costs an order of magnitude more. For reference, EIB’s support for a single BCS fibre project in DRC required significant development finance for a substantially smaller network with no cable component.
UIL’s public profile is thin. The company does not appear in major infrastructure development registries or the track records of DRC’s established contracting partners. Its capitalisation and prior project history are not publicly available. Unlike EIB, World Bank, IHS, or Helios — entities with audited financials and documented infrastructure delivery — UIL’s credibility as a counterparty to a deal of this scope cannot be independently verified from open sources.
The DRC Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications signed the deal. Until UIL’s financial capacity and delivery record are independently verified and made public, the 80,000-kilometre fibre claim and the 192 Tbps submarine cable should be treated as aspirational — not scheduled. This matters because the UIL deal has been cited in government communications as a core element of the plan’s private sector financing. If UIL cannot deliver, a significant portion of the fibre and submarine cable commitments have no credible backer.
Submarine Cable: Real Progress, Real Uncertainty
The DRC’s submarine cable position has improved materially, independently of UIL. In September 2023, Orange DRC and Airtel Congo RDC landed the 2Africa cable — a Meta consortium system with design capacity of 180 terabits per second — at Muanda in Kongo Central province. Commercial service began in early 2025, complementing the existing West Africa Cable System (WACS) at 14.5 Tbps. The 2Africa landing is a genuine step-change in international bandwidth access for the DRC.
UIL’s proposed 192 Tbps cable would be additive if delivered. Whether this is a genuine new-build submarine system or a capacity arrangement on an existing cable — and whether UIL holds the financing and consortium agreements to build it — is not clear from any available documentation.
What It Means If It Works
The DRC is the single largest connectivity gap on the continent. Over 111 million people, 30% internet penetration, a population projected at 150 million by 2035, and a mineral endowment — cobalt, coltan, lithium — that sits at the centre of every major technology supply chain. The March 2026 launch of the DRC’s interbank payments platform is the first proof point that Kinshasa can build the digital plumbing a modern economy requires. If even half the infrastructure targets are met — 15,000 towers, 40,000 kilometres of fibre, the World Bank-AfDB digital corridor to major cities — the DRC ceases to be a connectivity laggard and becomes a Central African anchor. The downstream effects for regional fintech, e-commerce, and cloud services are substantial. The plan is worth taking seriously. It is not worth taking at face value.
Primary sources: DRC National Digital Plan 2026–2030; DataReportal Digital 2025: Democratic Republic of the Congo; World Bank DRC Digital Economy Assessment; TechAfrica News (February 2026) on World Bank/AFD commitment; Bankable Africa on UIL $150M deal (October 2025); Tech In Africa on €8B plan financing breakdown; Helios Towers 2025 annual results and DRC market page; NCC Nigeria 2024 Network Performance Report; EIB Global DRC fibre press release (2023); Mawezi RDC 2Africa landing announcement (September 2023). Cross-references: BETA-389 (DRC Digital Plan overview) · BETA-709 (DRC Digital Code enforcement) · BETA-533 (East Africa data corridor).
UphivaBETAR
Joseph Busari
