Executives from Vodacom Tanzania and Fast Fibre have called for digital infrastructure investment in East Africa to move beyond major commercial centres, as the region’s connectivity, resilience and enterprise adoption needs evolve.
The remarks were made at ITW & Datacloud Africa 2026 in Nairobi, where representatives of the two companies addressed infrastructure reach, network resilience and enterprise technology adoption across separate sessions.
Aashiq Shariff, Managing Director of Fast Fibre, said Africa’s digital economy is expanding beyond traditional commercial hubs, with tier 2 and tier 3 cities increasingly demanding reliable digital services.
“Infrastructure investment needs to follow demand. Where customers and businesses are creating digital demand, infrastructure should increasingly be located closer to them,” he said.
Shariff said this becomes more important as cloud services, data-intensive applications and 5G expand into more markets. “As 5G expands into tier 2 and tier 3 towns, the supporting fibre infrastructure must expand with it,” he said.
He called for simplified licensing processes, greater regulatory harmonisation and better alignment of tax regimes to reduce barriers to investment. “When investors can navigate markets more easily, projects can move faster, infrastructure can reach more communities and businesses can gain access to better digital services sooner,” he said.
Shariff also urged that East Africa be viewed as one interconnected digital market rather than a collection of separate markets. “Data moves across borders, and businesses increasingly operate across borders. Our infrastructure and regulatory frameworks need to reflect that reality,” he said.
Andrew Lupembe, Network Director at Vodacom Tanzania, focused his remarks on network resilience, saying connectivity across the region needs to be reliable and capable of withstanding disruption as dependence on digital services grows.
He said Vodacom Tanzania has designed its network with more than one data centre and multiple fibre routes to reduce dependency on any single point of failure, an approach informed by a double fibre cut that disrupted connectivity across East Africa for several days.
“That experience reinforced an important lesson for us: resilience cannot be added after a disruption. It has to be designed into the network from the beginning,” Lupembe said.
He said this means having alternative fibre routes, diverse connectivity pathways and sufficient infrastructure capacity to maintain services when one route is affected.
Lupembe said the terrestrial route from Jerusalem to Mombasa through Tanzania’s National ICT Backbone is now operational, giving the company an additional pathway for international traffic, alongside its expanded participation in subsea cable infrastructure including the 2Africa cable.
He said Vodacom already provides 2.5MW of co-location capacity in Tanzania, with plans to scale further as demand grows, and pointed to an emerging opportunity in data-centre-as-a-service offerings that can support enterprises across the wider region.
“Ultimately, the strength of a digital economy depends on the reliability of the infrastructure beneath it,” Lupembe said.
Nguvu Kamando, Director at Vodacom Business, said the focus for enterprises is shifting from simply having connectivity to what can be built on top of it. “Connectivity on its own is no longer the end goal. The real opportunity is what businesses, governments and institutions can build on top of reliable connectivity,” he said.
He said artificial intelligence will reshape enterprise operations. “AI will rewrite telecoms and enterprise business. It will change how companies serve customers, analyse information, automate processes and make decisions,” Kamando said, adding that the question for businesses is no longer whether AI will affect their operations but how quickly they can adopt it to create measurable value.
Kamando said digital transformation should increasingly be measured by the problems it helps solve, pointing to health, agriculture, mining and education as sectors where technology can improve productivity, access to services and decision-making.
He said Vodacom Business’s regional relationships, including with Safaricom in Kenya, demonstrate the opportunities that exist when regional networks and capabilities are connected. “We need governments and industry to continue working together to remove barriers and make cross-border connectivity more seamless and simpler,” he said.
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