7,100 kilometers of high-speed fiber optic networks connecting Africa and the EU, including submarine cables across the Mediterranean (Medusa) and to East Africa (Africa 1), plus a potential extension to Dakar in West Africa, along with backbone digital networks spanning sub-Saharan Africa.
The MEDUSA and East Africa undersea cables are positioned to feed economic value into Europe’s digital industries while data flows in only one direction — from Africa to Europe.
What is noteworthy is that initiatives such as the East Africa Undersea Cable duplicate similar projects that are already serving the continent, including investments by the Aga Khan Development Network.
The Medusa project looks from afar as an infrastructure that may increase and improve internet access across the continent.
In reality they are positioned to feed into channels of economic value that ultimately augment the EU’s digital industries. The absence or weakness of net neutrality or data ownership legislation within these jurisdictions means that controlling the fiber-optic/undersea cables gives Europe ultimate control of data flows around the continent, allowing data to flow to European companies, gaining access to data to train its own AI models, and leveraging this dependency towards shaping internal decisions within African digital policy.
EU interventions reveal a consolidation of power at key layers of the data value chain. For instance, by plugging African universities into the MEDUSA, it will be possible to track important frontier innovations within the digital and AI economy that are being developed in Africa, and then be the first to invest, providing EU firms with key stakes in the right businesses.
Rhetorically, the EU says it will also open up its markets for African countries to compete in. However, to fully make use of these markets, such companies would require EU data and would need to have their countries ratified as GDPR-adequate by European authorities. Yet, to date, no African country has received an adequacy determination.
Africa simply cannot access EU data.
Data is a one-way traffic from Africa.
Such a double standard is particularly egregious when the EU is actively advocating against ‘data localization’ requirements by other countries in other multilateral contexts.