Africa’s digital economy is projected to reach $712 billion by 2050, up from $180 billion in 2025, however the continent still faces low internet penetration of 43%, compared to the global average of 68%.
And for businesses, this gap means higher expenses, slower access to cloud services and limited ability to scale competitively.
Today, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a WIOCC Group company, launched Open Access Fabric (OAfabric) in Nigeria (OADC Lagos) and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC (OADC Texaf – Kinshasa), to leapfrog these limitations and position Nigeria as Africa’s digital nerve centre.
With over 107 million internet users, Nigeria represents the continent’s largest digital market, but enterprises have long had challenges with high latency, expensive transit, and inconsistent local content access.
The game-changing interconnection platform, OAfabric directly addresses these challenges, providing secure, low-latency connections, direct peering with global cloud providers, and integration with leading African IXPs, including IXPN in Nigeria and KINIX in the DRC.
Speaking at the launch, Dr Ayotunde Coker, chief executive officer of OADC, said “We designed OAfabric around the real challenges African businesses face. It is about solving problems – reducing the cost to compute, improving performance, unlocking access to cloud and content, and creating an environment where companies can scale with confidence while accelerating time to market.”
OAfabric is engineered to scale from 1Gbps to 100Gbps, supporting hybrid colocation architectures, AI workloads, and data-intensive applications. Traditionally, enterprises had to rely on the open internet, risking security breaches and inconsistent performance. Coker highlighted the platform’s protective advantage:
“Without OAfabric, if you want to go to the cloud, you basically have to go to the open internet. All of us understand the disadvantages of pushing your content into the open internet. Companies now have to start building layers of security, all the years of security.
“But with OAfabric, it is a secured connection, structural cable connection from here all the way into the cloud environment, irrespective of where you are. So you are guaranteed that literally, for someone to hack, he has to use a source and come back in. It’s extremely secure connectivity.”
Resilient, Reliable, and Rapid
The platform’s resilience was demonstrated last year during a subsea cable disruption. OADC restored 2 terabytes of connectivity within 48 hours, a project that would normally take three months, stressing the network’s ability to maintain Africa’s digital backbone under extreme pressure.
Latency is dramatically reduced, a huge factor for enterprises in fintech, cloud services, and AI. Coker explained:
“We deliver a significant, well-reliable, low-latency connection. Latency between here and points in Europe, for instance, is significantly reduced. You can interconnect into Amsterdam, the UK, Marseille. We define with cloud providers exactly where we want to meet them and cross-connect very neatly, and it has a significant result on latency.”
Since 2018, OADC has expanded strategically across the continent. The Lagos data centre in Lekki currently operates at 2 megawatts, with plans to scale to 24 megawatts.
Facilities in Kinshasa and four South African cities—Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town—serve as interconnection points for global subsea cables including Google Aquiano and 2Africa, creating a robust pan-African network.
Coker elaborated that “OAfabric gives us a more efficient way of delivering growth, not just in one direction, but with the capability to reverse the direction as we have more internet exchanges here, localising data. As we bring more actual cloud on-ramps into the country, we build the infrastructure for those hyperscale ramps to come here, and that’s what we’re doing.”
OAfabric aligns with Nigeria’s mega cloud policy, ensuring sensitive data remains within national borders while empowering local cloud providers to compete with international hyperscalers. It also opens the Nigerian market to foreign investment, enabling cloud edge zones and disaster recovery zones to be deployed with speed and confidence.
Head of Converged Open and Digital Infrastructure, OADC Africa, Obinna Adumike, explained the reach of OAfabric beyond Nigeria and DRC:
“OAfabric is big, and it’s here. We have a very robust connectivity network, and the biggest advantage of that is the fact that WIOCC network can connect you to any country in the world, but most especially the closest continents that Africa impacts on; Africa, Europe, America, and then within the continent, East Africa, Southern Africa and all of that. These are the regions that most of our cloud users either connect to, send, or collect traffic.”
Simplifying Complexity for Enterprises
For businesses, OAfabric transforms previously complex digital operations into seamless, manageable workflows. Coker expatiated this:
“Think of OAfabric as a box in a data centre. You connect to it, choose your pipe size—like deciding between a two-lane or four-lane highway—and your data flows efficiently to the cloud. The faster and more reliable the connection, the better the user experience.”
“OAfabric is not just infrastructure; it represents a shift in what is possible for Africa’s digital economy,” added Dr Coker. “By removing barriers and enabling seamless, high-performance peering between key ecosystems, including local and global Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), content providers, cloud platforms and enterprises, it provides the frictionless interconnection needed to access digital services more efficiently.”
With OAfabric live in Nigeria and the DRC, OADC is creating a resilient, secure, and scalable pan-African digital ecosystem, empowering enterprises, accelerating innovation, and defining a new era of African digital sovereignty.
