Explore the critical question of whether Africa will remain a mere market for global data or emerge as a significant player in the digital economy.
Image: Pixabay
Globally, data has become a new commodity.
The challenge is no longer whether nations are connected, but who owns, governs and extracts value from this commodity.
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, Digital Economy Report 2021/2024 updates), over 70% of global data traffic is controlled by a small number of firms headquartered in the United States and China, underscoring the concentration of digital power. In this context, Africa’s digital trajectory raises a difficult but important question.
In the European Union (EU), data sovereignty has become an explicit policy.
Frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have allowed the EU to control data flows, platform accountability and citizen privacy.
The GDPR has had extraterritorial impact, applying to any firm processing EU citizens’ data globally.
More recently, GAIA-X has sought to reduce over-dependence on United States (US) hyperscalers.
Hypescralers are cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Over 65% of Europe’s cloud market remains controlled by US hyperscalers.
The US operates through corporate sovereignty. Its firms dominate global digital infrastructure: Amazon Web Services alone accounts for roughly 30–32% of global cloud market share, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud (Statista, 2025).
Meanwhile, China has pursued an assertive state-led digital sovereignty model.
Companies such as Alibaba and Huawei export not just infrastructure, but embedded governance standards, particularly across Africa and Asia through the Digital Silk Road (World Bank, 2023; OECD, 2024).
While all of this is happening in developed economies, Africa on the other hand reportedly has less than 1–2% of global data centre capacity, despite accounting for nearly 18% of the world’s population (Africa Data Centres Association, 2024; UNCTAD, 2024).
The continent is entering this contest already structurally disadvantaged and remains heavily reliant on foreign-owned cloud services. Hyperscalers continue to expand in Africa, but ownership and control remain external.
Data generated in African markets is often stored, processed, and monetized in other regions.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC, Digital Economy for Africa Initiative) estimates that Africa’s digital economy could reach $180 billion by 2025 and $712 billion by 2050. However, much of the value chain - particularly in cloud, AI, and data analytics-remains offshore.
Even where innovation is visible, fintech in Kenya, platform ecosystems in Nigeria, and digital public services in Rwanda.
The underlying stack frequently depends on external infrastructure and APIs. For instance, over 80% of African startups rely on foreign cloud infrastructure providers (Partech Africa Tech Report, 2024).
Africa innovates at the application layer; however, value accrues at the infrastructure and data layer, largely controlled elsewhere.
Take for example, in South Africa, one of the largest credit reporting firms operates locally but is owned by Experian, listed on the London Stock Exchange.
This reflects a broader pattern where data-intensive industries are embedded locally but governed and monetised globally. This creates a structural asymmetry.
The real question is.
Will Africa remain a data source for global value chains or become a co-architect of digital systems that shape its future?
When African user data trains digital systems owned by firms in the US, EU and China, the concern is not just economic, it is epistemic.
According to UNCTAD (2024), the top 10 global digital platforms - mostly US and Chinese - account for over 90% of global market capitalisation in the platform economy.
Who, then, defines reality in the digital age?
The question of whether colonialism is re-emerging in a new form warrants serious examination.
While "digital colonialism" is frequently deployed as rhetorical shorthand, its underlying dynamics are empirically measurable across several critical dimensions:
Research by the Oxford Internet Institute (2025) shows that algorithmic systems increasingly mediate information flows in emerging markets, often without local oversight or transparency.
Today, African states do possess agency. Governments can legislate, coordinate regionally, and scale local firms.
The issue is not outright domination. It is asymmetric interdependence, where participation is high, but control is limited.
Africa’s digital economy often leapfrogs legacy systems. Mobile money remains the canonical example, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for over 70% of global mobile money transactions by value (GSMA State of the Industry Report, 2024).
However, leapfrogging at the user level is obscured by backward integration at the systems level. Africa may be advancing technologically while regressing structurally.
The paradox? Visible innovation, invisible dependency.
Digital sovereignty does not occur in isolation. It requires strategic control over key layers of the digital stack:
Collective bargaining power through continental bodies such as the African Union (AU), which has already adopted the AU Data Policy Framework (2022) to guide member states
That said, policy discussions around data sovereignty are gaining traction across the continent. However, fragmentation remains a risk. National approaches may be too small to counter global platform power. Especially when compared to bloc-level strategies in the EU or state-coordinated models in China. The real issue may not be whether “digital colonialism” exists in the traditional sense. That framing may oversimplify a far more complex system of incentives and dependencies.
The real issue is this:
In the digital economy, sovereignty is not declared, it is engineered.
Philasande Sokhela is the Director: Center for African Business and Internationalisation (Johannesburg Business School – University of Johannesburg).
Philasande Sokhela is the Director: Center for African Business and Internationalisation (Johannesburg Business School – University of Johannesburg).
Image: Supplied.
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