Investment in digital infrastructure is fundamental to the economic growth of the Southern African region, enabling productivity while also expanding access to education, healthcare, government services, and digital employment opportunities. However, while cities like Johannesburg or Windhoek, 4G and emerging 5G deployments closely match developed-world baselines, step into a rural settlement, and you’ll find the infrastructure profile flatlines.
This picture illustrates a central problem in South Africa and the broader Southern African region, where rapid expansion of digital connectivity in profitable urban and high-income markets is undercut by underserved rural, peri-urban, and low-income communities. The situation is symptomatic of an ICT landscape in which infrastructure financing has remained skewed toward backbone connectivity, while last-mile investments, critical for inclusive access, are often underfunded. This gap is not solely a function of capital scarcity, but also of risk perceptions, regulatory uncertainty, fragmented markets, and limited public-sector coordination.
These realities reveal a universal truth, as repeatedly shown by After Access studies: that coverage does not automatically translate into adoption and use, and although connectivity is expanding, digital exclusion persists and, in many cases, intensifies.
Examining digital connectivity in South Africa and the broader Southern African region, this report interrogates common narratives about systematic underinvestment in connectivity, where such underinvestment is most pronounced, and how it intersects with existing socio-economic inequalities. It finds that the underinvestment narrative is partially valid but overstated, pointing less to a shortage of capital and more to a combination of uneven investment distribution, affordability barriers, regulatory dynamics, and broader structural constraints.
Arguing that fixating solely on telecommunications investment policy misses the broader structural bottleneck, this policy paper calls for a more comprehensive approach that goes beyond mobilising additional finance to include regulatory reform, affordability interventions, and more coordinated infrastructure planning aligned with inclusive development objectives. Without this, digital infrastructure expansion only risks reproducing existing inequalities rather than narrowing them.
