The phrase “digital public infrastructure” used to live in conference halls.In 2026 it has started to look like a work plan.
In late June, the United Nations Development Programme launched the Africa Accelerator for Digital Public Infrastructure in New York and published a companion report arguing that trusted identity, payments and data systems could help African states deliver services under tighter budgets and capture more of the estimated $450 billion opportunity tied to the African Continental Free Trade Area. The report’s blunt numbers have been circulating ever since: more than a billion mobile subscriptions on the continent, yet more than 500 million people still without a verifiable digital identity, and more than 80 percent of workers still outside the formal economy.
Governments are no longer treating that gap as a future problem. In May, the AfCFTA Secretariat named Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria as the first countries for ADAPT, the Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade initiative. The idea is unglamorous and ambitious at the same time: shared digital rails so that trade documents, identity checks and payments can move across borders without being rebuilt in every capital. Officials say early work will focus on live data exchange and digitised paperwork for firms already trading inside the free-trade area.
The private sector has moved in behind them. In July, Equity Group, the AfricaNenda Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced a partnership to push interoperable payments, digital identity and data exchange, starting in Rwanda and later the Democratic Republic of Congo. Equity’s chief executive, James Mwangi, was named the continent’s first Digital Public Infrastructure Champion, a title that would have sounded ornamental a few years ago. The partners put the exclusion figure at nearly 400 million people still outside formal finance, despite Africa’s lead in mobile money.
Payments remain the most mature piece of the stack. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System now links more than 19 countries, offering a way to settle trade in local currencies instead of routing every invoice through a correspondent bank in Europe. Assessments published in August by groups including the World Bank’s ID4D programme pointed to falling onboarding costs and cheaper remittances where digital identity and instant payments have been joined. Nigeria’s identity authority says its NINAuth platform handles more than 1.3 million verifications a day. Ethiopia reports more than 15 million Fayda registrations on the way to a much larger target. Rwanda is close to full adult coverage.
The pipes underneath those systems are being laid as well. Nigeria is preparing to start construction in October on Project BRIDGE, a 90,000-kilometre fibre expansion that would lift the national backbone from about 35,000 kilometres to 125,000 and reach all 774 local government areas. Officials in Abuja said this week they also want $750 million in private money over two years for local cloud and data centres, arguing that a country of Nigeria’s size cannot keep sending its public data abroad if it wants to run services, or later artificial intelligence, on its own terms. MTN has separately formed Africa Data Hub with a UAE investor to build AI-ready capacity, beginning in South Africa and Nigeria.
Not every headline is a rollout. An African Union delegation visited Karnataka this week to study India’s experience with large-scale public digital systems, a sign that capitals are still shopping for models as much as they are switching them on. Civil society reports continue to warn that biometric enrolment can lock people out of the very services the new systems are meant to open.
The pattern, though, is no longer a scatter of pilot projects. Identity systems, payment rails, fibre and data centres are being discussed as one problem: how to make a market of 1.4 billion people function without forcing every transaction through paper, cash or a foreign intermediary. That is the news. The test will be whether the rails reach the trader at the border and the clinic in a district town, or stop at the press conference.
