A single undersea cable snaps, and suddenly half your apps don’t load. A national power outage hits, and even paying for bread becomes a digital gamble. Sounds dramatic? It’s not. West Africa lived it when four cables broke in March 2024, plunging 13 countries into online limbo. Barely two months later, Kenya and the rest of East Africa were hobbling when the EASSy and SEACOM cables were sliced off the KwaZulu-Natal coast, forcing Internet traffic to limp for three painful weeks until repairs wrapped up in June. And in December, Kenya’s six-hour nationwide blackout made us realise just how quickly the web can go dark.
These breakdowns revealed a hard truth: Africa’s Internet is far too fragile for a continent racing towards a cashless, digital-first future. Now, telecom leaders say enough is enough. Enter the Model Framework for Building Internet Resilience in Africa, a bold playbook being sold as the insurance policy against “digital darkness.”
So, what’s this framework about?
The African Telecommunications Union (ATU), the Internet Society (ISOC), and AFRINIC have teamed up to create a continental guide for building sturdier Internet systems. At its heart are three focus areas:
Networks and ISPs – making sure service providers can stay afloat even during crises.
Critical infrastructure – protecting the lifelines: power grids, undersea and terrestrial cables, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), and domain registries.
Market conditions – keeping competition alive and services affordable so that providers have the cash flow to keep networks resilient.
That last piece may surprise you. But as the framework notes, cheap Internet is great until providers can’t fund backups or invest in redundancy. In other words: reliability isn’t free.
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What changes on the ground?
If a country adopts this framework, any operator that runs part of the Internet’s nervous system, whether it’s Safaricom, Kenya Power, Liquid, or the .ke domain registry, will be required to file a Plan for Resilience within a year. Think of it as a digital fire drill on steroids. These plans must spell out how they’re baking in redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapid recovery. And they won’t gather dust. Every year, they’ll have to be reviewed, tested, and updated. The framework even pushes for stress tests: intentionally poking holes in networks to see if they bend or break.
Why now?
Because the warning signs are flashing bright red. Africa is still, as ATU boss John Omo put it, “one cable cut or nationwide blackout away from another digital standstill.” Schools, hospitals, markets, and mobile money can’t afford to keep stuttering every time the grid sneezes or a ship’s anchor drifts too close to a fiber cable.
The framework borrows from heavyweights like the EU’s directive on critical infrastructure, the UK’s “anticipate, react, recover” model, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s six-step resilience playbook. But it isn’t a copy-paste job. It’s tailored to Africa’s realities: fragile grids, long undersea dependencies, and affordability challenges.
ISOC’s Pulse platform will provide the data muscle, tracking Internet performance and resilience across the continent in real time. That means decision-makers won’t just be flying blind. They’ll have numbers to guide investments and policies.
Of course, a framework is only as strong as its adoption. The ATU will circulate it to member states, but governments will need to translate it into law, regulators will need to enforce it, and operators will need to actually implement it. That’s a tall order, but also a necessary one. Africa’s digital boom is happening whether infrastructure is ready or not. More people are streaming, transacting, and studying online every day. But as 2024 reminded us, one weak link can unplug an entire region.
The new resilience framework doesn’t promise perfection. But it does promise preparation and that alone could be the difference between a continent plunged into digital darkness and one that bends without breaking.