Digital Infrastructure: Implications for Africa’s Environment, Agriculture, and Food Systems (opens in new tab)

Africa’s digitalisation is being built through the same extractive routes that shaped the continent’s colonial past. Subsea cables – 1.5 million km of them – now ferry 99% of global data traffic while driving new waves of mineral extraction, seabed disturbance, coastal erosion, and pressure on small-scale fishers. Behind the promise of “connectivity” lies a chain of impacts that communities, ecosystems, and food systems are forced to absorb – from destructive copper and quartz mining to poorl...