Latest writing
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Sovereignty 16 June 2026
Where does pragmatic engagement end and forfeiture begin?
A test of the African digital sovereignty argument through the lens of Cassava Technologies and its relationships with NVIDIA, hyperscalers and US LLMs.
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Sovereignty 11 June 2026
Regional data localisation only works if African-owned operators can run the trusted zone. They can.
Profiles of twelve African-owned companies delivering digital infrastructure show that sovereign regional data localisation is possible.
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Sovereignty 3 June 2026
Sovereignty, data localisation and the off-site backup problem in Sub-Saharan Africa
How can African governments and large enterprises ensure that the backups of their data are kept sovereign?
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Governance 28 May 2026
Africa launched two competing cross-border data exchange systems within five days of each other. Nobody noticed.
AfCFTA and Smart Africa are building competing cross-border data exchange systems in a direct contradiction to the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa.
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Sovereignty 20 May 2026
Partner or predator?
An in-depth audit of Google's footprint in Africa and its consequences for digital sovereignty.
Lab
All lab items →Sub-Saharan Africa's data centre landscape: who owns the infrastructure? (v2)
A mapping of ownership, control and foreign dependency across data centres in Sub-Saharan Africa — revised and re-verified
A revised attempt to collect data on Sub-Saharan Africa's data centres with a particular focus on ownership and influence. Includes a downloadable dataset and the metadata instructing Perplexity how to collect the data.
Submarine cables serving Africa
A factsheet
A dataset covering the main submarine cables serving Africa, past, present and planned. Who owns them, when they came into service, and how much they can carry.
A Glossary of ICT Infrastructure Terms
A non-technical guide
A plain-English reference for the technical, commercial and policy vocabulary that recurs across writing on digital infrastructure — submarine cables, data centres, cloud, AI compute, ownership structures, and digital sovereignty.
Undersea cables for dummies
A non-technical guide
A plain-English explainer about undersea cables. What are they, how their capacity is bought and sold, and how the companies that run them make money.
Ituri Province (DRC) Ebola Outbreak Infrastructure Factsheet
Ad-hoc data collection on available infrastructures
This document is a test of the developing abilities of AI-powered search to collect useful information on a quick turnaround without any prior knowledge or expertise. The data it contains has been cited but not verified.