Accelerating
Digital Transformation

Meta is the leading investor in the consortium delivering 2Africa. Africa’s largest subsea cable system to date, it is the first to connect East and West Africa, adding vast international capacity, cutting latency, and reducing the costs of delivering bandwidth across the continent. By delivering up to 180 Tbps of capacity, more than all existing cables combined, 2Africa unlocks new categories of digital activity from real-time telemedicine platforms, cloud-based education tools, AI applications requiring low latency, and remote work capabilities that connect African professionals to global opportunities. We estimate that over the next decade, the 2Africa cable will enable $16 billion a year in economic activity for the region’s economy.

Meta’s open-source AI models, such as LLaMA and No Language Left Behind, reduce barriers like licensing fees, infrastructure costs, and language support, making it easier for African developers to adopt and deploy advanced AI. By making advanced models freely available and supporting Africa’s low-resource languages, Meta supports African developers with building locally-relevant solutions, overcoming language barriers and reducing costs. These tools could support an estimated $23 billion in economic activity for Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital economy over the next decade, as African-built AI solutions unlock new possibilities in agriculture, healthcare, education, and commerce.

Meta’s long-term commitment and investments are accelerating Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital transformation—catalyzing economic growth, innovation, and inclusion at unprecedented scale. This report, Meta: Supporting Sub-Saharan Africa’s Digital Transformation, demonstrates Meta’s commitment to unlocking Africa’s digital potential.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital transformation is being shaped by the vision, ingenuity, and determination of its leaders, entrepreneurs, youth, and communities. By 2035, the region’s digital economy is projected to more than double in size—from $130 billion today to $300 billion—unlocking new opportunities for growth, innovation, and inclusion. Yet, realizing this potential requires overcoming persistent barriers: limited international bandwidth, high infrastructure costs, and restricted access to advanced technology and capital. Addressing these challenges demands bold investment, innovation, and collaboration.

In 2025, Meta’s investments into digital infrastructure unlocked $16 billion in economic value for businesses and consumers across Sub-Saharan Africa. These achievements are possible through deep collaboration with African governments, policymakers, industry leaders, and communities.

Our approach is grounded in three interconnected pillars. First, we are expanding digital infrastructure through initiatives like the 2Africa subsea cable, terrestrial backhaul, and edge networks, working to make high-speed, reliable internet accessible and affordable. This connectivity lays the foundation for real-time services, remote work, and the next generation of African innovation.

Second, we are empowering entrepreneurs and businesses. Meta’s platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Meta AI, and Threads—are tools that millions of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs use to launch, grow, and reach new markets. These platforms help entrepreneurs overcome traditional barriers, connect with customers across borders, and scale their impact.

Third, we are democratizing access to advanced technology. By making open-source AI models like LLaMA and No Language Left Behind freely available, we support African developers in creating solutions tailored to local needs—in health, education, agriculture, and beyond. Already, innovators are building local language apps, enhancing service delivery, and driving progress in alignment with the African Union’s AI strategy. By making these advanced technologies openly available, Meta is championing Africa’s journey toward AI sovereignty, ensuring that African developers and institutions have the resources and autonomy to shape their own digital futures.

These three pillars of work have yielded tangible results. The impact is visible in the stories of entrepreneurs reaching new markets, young people building in local languages, and communities across the continent using technology to solve real-world problems. But the work is far from finished. Sustainable digital transformation demands strong partnerships, forward-looking policies, and a shared commitment to ensuring that the benefits of innovation are widely and equitably distributed.

Since opening our first African office in Johannesburg in 2015 and expanding to Lagos, Meta has deepened its commitment to the continent’s digital future. Our progress is possible through strong partnerships and policy environments we champion, ensuring our efforts are closely aligned with the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

As Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital economy accelerates, Meta remains a steadfast partner, committed to empowering the continent’s people to shape their own inclusive and globally competitive digital future.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital economy is projected to more than double from $130 billion today to $300 billion by 2035. African entrepreneurs and businesses are driving this growth, but three mutually reinforcing barriers could slow that progress:

• Limited high-performance connectivity, which lower the viability of real-time services and sophisticated digital applications
• High capital requirements, such as the costs of physical infrastructure and traditional advertising, which make it harder for businesses to thrive
• Barriers to adopting advanced technology, such as high licensing fees and language gaps, which constrain innovation and opportunities for African developers.

Meta’s investments across the region are addressing these barriers, enabling African businesses and developers to compete globally and serve their communities.

African businesses are developing advanced real-time services in medicine, education, and technology that drive new forms of growth. However, these innovations rely on performance: a doctor in Kenya needs high-speed bandwidth to expand telehealth, while a developer in Lagos depends on low latency to deploy AI solutions. Meta’s investments, including edge networks and the 2Africa cable, help bridge this gap, making high-performance, reliable connectivity economically viable across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Edge networks cache content locally, reducing latency and costs, which enables real-time services like video calls, e-health, and AI, while encouraging operators to expand into underserved areas. And by providing high-capacity global bandwidth, the 2Africa cable will connect millions more users and enable African businesses to compete on an international stage.

African entrepreneurs are rapidly using digital tools to build and scale their businesses, reaching customers across the continent and globally. Meta’s platforms are lowering the capital costs traditionally associated with starting a business – reducing reliance on physical storefronts, lowering the cost of advertising, and making coordination across distances simpler and more affordable. This accessibility in turn supports the growth of SMEs and the local economies that surround them.

This activity creates a ripple effect: telecommunications operators benefit from increased data demand, businesses see productivity gains, and consumers find more value and choice. Meta’s platforms act as digital infrastructure that helps transform the ambitions of the African Continental Free Trade Area into practical, economic opportunity.

Edge networks cache content locally, reducing latency and costs, which enables real-time services like video calls, e-health, and AI, while encouraging operators to expand into underserved areas. And by providing high-capacity global bandwidth, the 2Africa cable will connect millions more users and enable African businesses to compete on an international stage.

In 2025, we estimate that Meta’s investments into digital infrastructure – from terrestrial backhaul fibre investments to edge infrastructure – unlocked $16 billion in economic value for businesses and consumers across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Meta’s edge infrastructure – from content delivery networks to Internet exchange points – brings content closer to users, allowing a user in Nairobi to be served from Nairobi instead of a hub in another city, country, or continent. This cuts latency and bandwidth costs for Sub-Saharan Africa’s 400+ million internet users, making it more affordable for operators to expand coverage and enabling faster, more reliable digital services across Africa.

Joining an ecosystem of other critical new subsea investments serving the continent, the 2Africa subsea cable, supported by foundational investment from Meta, will deliver up to 180 Tbps of international bandwidth — more than the combined capacity delivered by all existing cables in Africa today. This substantial increase in capacity responds directly to rising demand, enhancing network resilience, reducing latency and costs, and enabling advanced real-time services.

By providing high-capacity global bandwidth, 2Africa will connect millions of new users, helping bridge the digital divide, enable new business models, and unlock the next stage of economic growth.
Over the next decade, we estimate that the 2Africa cable will add $16 billion a year to Sub-Saharan Africa’s economy.

The economic value from 2Africa emerges through key pathways:
First, reduced latency enhances the reliability and scalability of technically demanding services: telemedicine platforms benefit from stable, high-quality video connections; education platforms offer smoother user experiences; and AI applications that rely on real-time processing benefit from faster response speeds. By lowering latency and increasing bandwidth, 2Africa empowers African developers to expand and strengthen these services.

Second, cost efficiencies help make data-intensive services even more commercially viable: enabling a Kenyan startup to stream high-quality video content; a Nigerian fintech to process transactions in real-time; and a South African cloud platform to grow its service offering. These efficiencies support the growth ambitions of African businesses.

Third, increased capacity supports market access: African businesses can serve international customers with global-standard performance; remote workers can connect seamlessly to global labour markets; and content creators can reach audiences without geographic constraints.

Together, these pathways support real-time remote work, scalable online education, telemedicine, and the growth of locally hosted AI and cloud services across Africa. This will broaden access to global markets for African businesses and help lay the groundwork for scale and innovation. As a result, new industries are set to grow on a foundation of reliable, high-speed internet.


We estimate that by 2035, 2Africa will have brought 90 million additional Africans online.

African entrepreneurs building businesses face capital barriers like the cost of physical storefronts, expensive communication infrastructure, and traditional advertising requiring significant upfront investment. Easing these capital requirements can help ensure that commerce is driven by open competition, innovative ideas, and local market knowledge.

Meta’s platforms help African entrepreneurs convert connectivity into economic opportunity. They provide accessible digital tools that support businesses as they grow, drive data demand for telecom operators, and enable households to communicate and access information. By offering alternatives to physical storefronts and lowering advertising and communication costs, Meta’s platforms expand access to economic participation.

Meta’s platforms—Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp— reduce three significant capital barriers for African entrepreneurs by offering low-cost, digital alternatives to physical storefronts, expensive communication, and traditional advertising.

This allows a tailor in Lagos to serve customers across borders from her phone, enabling African SMEs to access global markets more readily. These platforms also support new economic sectors like digital marketing, creating further opportunities for growth. The benefits extend beyond business owners: companies can reach more customers, consumers find greater choice and savings, households connect more efficiently, and telecom operators see increased data demand.

Business Value

• Meta’s platforms serve as digital storefronts, reducing the need for commercial rents, providing a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising, and allowing businesses to reach markets beyond their local area. We estimate that 74 million African businesses leveraged Meta’s platforms in 2025, contributing an overall $16 billion to regional GDP.
• Instant messaging on Meta’s platforms streamlines internal coordination and communication with customers, saving businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa an estimated 4 billion hours each year, equivalent to $5.5 billion in productivity gains.
• As people come online to access Meta’s family of apps and social platforms, this creates an estimated $4.7 billion in additional economic activity for the telecommunications industry.

Consumer and Household Value

• By creating transparent, accessible markets on platforms such as Facebook Marketplace, Meta’s tools enable consumers to easily compare prices and negotiate, supporting an estimated $13 billion a year in consumer savings through increased market transparency and access to competitive pricing.
• Messaging, voice and video calling features on Meta’s platforms enable families to stay connected across distances, freeing up an estimated $5.4 billion in disposable income
or households through more efficient, data-enabled communication.

Previously, a physical presence was a significant barrier for small businesses wanting to sell across the continent. Today, platforms like Meta’s lower that barrier, enabling a business in Accra to reach customers in Nairobi, Lagos, and Johannesburg from a single account. This helps connect 54 national markets, allowing businesses to more easily access the 1.3 billion-person African Continental Free Trade Area.
Survey data corroborates the broad-based impact of Meta’s platforms:

• 72% of the businesses in our online poll strongly agree that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have expanded their customer base beyond local geography.
• 87% of online adults in our poll report feeling closer to friends and family across the region thanks to Meta’s family of apps.

African developers are building AI solutions for African contexts, from agricultural advisories in local languages to healthcare triage systems for under-resourced clinics. However, to scale these efforts, developers must navigate costs such as licensing fees, cloud infrastructure, hardware, and the reality that most AI models don’t support African languages. While platforms give tens of millions of businesses a ‘digital storefront,’ expanding access to advanced AI tools offers the next level of capability required to compete and scale to a much wider range of innovators. These entrepreneurs now need sophisticated technology to optimise operations and understand customers. This is precisely the capability that open-source AI delivers.

Meta’s open-source AI tools enable African developers to build locally relevant solutions by lowering the cost and infrastructure barriers that would make participation in the AI revolution more difficult.

Developing AI applications traditionally require significant investments in licensing, cloud or GPU infrastructure, and specialised hardware. Meta’s open-source models help reduce these costs. Pre-trained models like LLaMA reduce the need for massive training budgets. No Language Left Behind expands translation potential for Africa’s low-resource languages, while PyTorch machine learning frameworks and React Native development tools provide the core building blocks for modern AI applications.

In this way, open source AI tools like this enable bottom-up innovation. Developers can adapt pre-trained models for local contexts, deploy applications from affordable hosting, and iterate their builds without capital constraints. And critically, African developers have ownership over the technology addressing African needs—building technological sovereignty alongside economic value.

African developers are already creating AI solutions that serve users:

• Akili AI: Akili AI, launched in 2025, uses Meta’s open-source LLaMA models to give African small business owners practical AI assistance—finding markets, improving sales, and understanding finance. What makes this significant is not just the technology but the access: by building on freely available models, Akili AI’s developers avoided licensing fees that would have made their business model unviable. Their tools are already being used by companies across the continent, demonstrating that when barriers are removed, African developers build solutions people actually use.
• Jacaranda Health: Jacaranda Health’s PROMPTS system shows how open-source AI enables solutions for African healthcare challenges. This AI-powered SMS service gives pregnant women and new mothers timely care information, reads incoming texts, triages risk, and connects women to nurses or referrals when needed. Built on accessible AI tools, it has supported millions of pregnancy journeys and is scaling with governments—clear evidence that African-developed AI is addressing real needs at scale.
• Foondamate: Foondamate, a South African company, built an AI study assistant that students access directly on WhatsApp and Messenger. The system helps learners with maths problems, provides explanations, assists with research, and supports essay development. Built on Meta’s LLaMA AI models and deployed on platforms students already use, Foondamate has supported over 3 million students. This represents African-led innovation solving African educational challenges—made possible because the underlying technology was freely available rather than behind access barriers.

81% of online adults in Sub-Saharan Africa agree that AI products developed within Africa will be important for the continent’s economic growth. Similarly, 66% of online business leaders in our poll say that they would use open-source AI tools if they were available and accessible.
By lowering barriers across the capital and infrastructure stack, Meta’s open-source approach gives entrepreneurs access to technology that previously required venture funding or corporate resources.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital economy stands at an inflection point. Entrepreneurs building businesses across borders, developers creating AI solutions in local languages, healthcare workers extending care through digital platforms—all demonstrate the scale of Africa’s digital transformation.

Meta’s infrastructure investments, digital platforms, and open-source tools look to tackle historic barriers and strengthen the foundations for this innovation. The 2Africa cable reduces bandwidth constraints and latency, enabling real-time services digital services. Digital platforms lower the cost of starting a business and open the door to new markets. Open-source AI tools broaden access to advanced technologies that support new, locally relevant solutions.

These three pillars work together: developers building AI solutions need both the tools and the infrastructure to deploy them; entrepreneurs reaching customers across the AfCFTA need both the platforms and the connectivity to serve them.

But infrastructure and tools alone do not create a $300 billion digital economy. That requires collective effort – from African governments creating enabling regulatory frameworks, to telecommunications operators expanding connectivity, to financial institutions developing payment systems, to educational institutions building technical capacity, and development partners supporting digital transformation. Meta contributes by helping to reduce infrastructure constraints and technology access barriers – ensuring these do not limit what African innovators can build.

The case studies in this report—Akili AI supporting small businesses, Jacaranda Health serving pregnant women, Foondamate helping students learn—represent a broader pattern: when barriers are removed, African developers build solutions that serve real needs at scale. By 2035, Africa’s digital economy reaching $300 billion will be the cumulative outcome of African entrepreneurship, innovation, and technical capacity— supported by infrastructure that makes global competition possible and tools that democratise access to advanced technology.