Digital Infrastructure: Implications for Africa’s Environment, Agriculture, and Food Systems
Linking Africa with cables: resource extraction, impact on marine and coastal ecosystems, & climate footprint – a free-for-all?
Africa’s digitalisation is being built through the same extractive routes that shaped the continent’s colonial past. Subsea cables – 1.5 million km of them – now ferry 99% of global data traffic while driving new waves of mineral extraction, seabed disturbance, coastal erosion, and pressure on small-scale fishers. Behind the promise of “connectivity” lies a chain of impacts that communities, ecosystems, and food systems are forced to absorb – from destructive copper and quartz mining to poorly understood marine ecological risks. Yet governance is dominated by industry and Big Tech interests, with no multilateral body monitoring the environmental harm.
Fact sheet 2 exposes the hidden ecological and social costs of Africa’s digital infrastructure and calls for accountability in a system where profit, not people or planet, sets the agenda.