Central Africa
The Republic of the Congo — Congo-Brazzaville, not to be confused with its much larger neighbor across the river, the Democratic Republic of Congo — has spent the past several years building some of the physical bones of a digital economy: a submarine cable landing, a national data center, expanding 4G coverage and a growing mobile money market. Yet a GSMA report unveiled in Brazzaville in June 2026 delivered a sobering diagnosis: infrastructure has outpaced adoption, and closing that usage gap will require as much policy reform as further construction.
High Coverage, Low Usage: The Core Paradox
According to the GSMA's report, Driving Digital Transformation of the Economy in the Republic of Congo, presented at the GSMA's Digital Africa Summit in Brazzaville on June 22, 2026, 86% of the Congolese population is already covered by 4G networks. But only 19% of the population actually uses mobile internet — meaning roughly 70% of people who live within network coverage remain offline. The GSMA's Digital Nations and Society Index for 2025 scores Congo at just 26 out of 100 overall, with a Digital Policy and Regulatory Index sub-score of 33 out of 100, a signal that the country's enabling environment — pricing, taxation, licensing, digital skills — is lagging well behind its physical network build-out.
The report frames closing this gap as a major economic opportunity as much as a social one. GSMA modeling projects that targeted policy and regulatory reforms could unlock FCFA 870 billion (roughly $1.4 billion) in additional economic value by 2030, create more than 144,000 new jobs, and connect over 540,000 additional people to mobile internet, bringing the total user base to about 2.2 million people, or roughly 31% of the population. The fiscal case is also significant: reforms are projected to generate a net tax impact of about FCFA 93 billion in 2030 alone, and FCFA 174 billion in cumulative additional tax revenue between now and the end of the decade, driven by broader economic growth and more efficient digital tax collection.
What's Holding Adoption Back
GSMA's Caroline Mbugua, Senior Director for Public Policy and Communication, summarized the core diagnosis: "The Republic of the Congo has built a strong foundation in mobile connectivity, but bridging the usage gap now requires coordinated fiscal, regulatory and demand-side reforms." The report identifies smartphone affordability as a central constraint, alongside limited digital skills and a regulatory environment that has not kept pace with the sector's growth. Specific reform recommendations include removing the tax on electronic communications (TTCE), reversing a CFA 10,000 SIM-enabled device tax, reducing levies on mobile money withdrawals, and eliminating customs duties on entry-level smartphones — all measures aimed squarely at the affordability barrier that keeps large numbers of covered Congolese offline. Extending 4G coverage further, from an already-high 89% to a targeted 97% of the population, is treated as a secondary priority behind fixing the usage gap among people already covered.
These recommendations sit within a four-pillar reform roadmap: strengthening the infrastructure investment environment (competition reviews, technology-neutral licensing, spectrum reform, streamlined rights-of-way approvals); using digital technology to boost government revenue and rationalize sector-specific taxation; increasing smartphone affordability and digital skills; and modernizing the regulatory framework, including a push toward a National AI Strategy aligned with continental priorities. The report explicitly ties its recommendations to two existing government frameworks — the Congo Digital Strategy 2030 and the National Development Plan 2022-2026 — positioning the GSMA's proposals as an accelerant rather than a competing agenda.
Congo Brazzaville
The Infrastructure Already in Place
Congo-Brazzaville's connectivity foundation has been under construction since the early 2020s under the government's original digital roadmap, Congo Digital 2025, built around three pillars: digital services and content for the public, digital governance, and ICT-driven development for private business. The centerpiece infrastructure investment was the Digital Transformation Acceleration Project, a €136.5 million initiative launched in 2023 with the European Union, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank, aimed at expanding internet access and modernizing public administration. As part of that project, the Brazzaville Chamber of Commerce opened a digital skills training center in August 2024, including a dedicated cybersecurity training room.
On the physical network side, fiber-optic connectivity from the 2Africa submarine cable — a Meta-led consortium project aiming to link Africa, Europe and the Middle East and serve an eventual three billion people — came online in Congolese waters in February 2024, following a logistics operation completed by multimodal operator AGL in September 2023. Complementing that international gateway, Brazzaville-based operator Silicone Connect runs a 120-km metropolitan fiber network serving institutional and business clients, and has been building a 325-km fiber corridor between Ouesso and the Congo border, alongside plans for a Pokola-to-Bangui link by 2026 intended to give the Central African Republic and neighboring markets redundant connectivity routes through Congolese territory rather than a single vulnerable path.
Domestic data sovereignty has also advanced. The African Development Bank financed a $72.8 million data center — the first of its kind in Central Africa — that was slated for completion in December 2024, alongside 600 km of new fiber-optic cable to strengthen connectivity with neighboring countries. The AfDB and Congolese officials have framed the facility explicitly around "national and subregional digital sovereignty," positioning Brazzaville as a potential regional hub for data storage and processing rather than a market dependent on capacity hosted abroad.
On mobile networks, MTN Congo became the country's 5G pioneer, launching commercial service in October 2024 after a pilot phase that began in October 2022, achieving data speeds above 10 Gbps in testing. The country's Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, under Minister Léon Juste Ibombo, streamlined licensing to enable the rollout, part of a stated ambition for the Republic of Congo to become a leading regional player in information and communications technology.
Mobile Money: Deep Penetration, Fragmented Rails
Financial inclusion via mobile phones has advanced faster than internet usage. More than 65% of adults in Congo-Brazzaville hold a mobile money account through MTN MoMo or Airtel Money, compared with less than 8% of the population owning a bank card — a reminder that, as in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile money rather than traditional banking is the primary vehicle for financial inclusion. Congo-Brazzaville counted more than 3 million active mobile money accounts in 2026. MTN MoMo holds a dominant position with more than 60% market share, while Airtel Money holds roughly 35%, leaving the market highly concentrated between two operators.
Historically, that duopoly meant users of one network could not easily transact with users of the other — a friction point common across African mobile money markets. That began changing after MTN Congo and Airtel Congo signed a convention in March 2024 unifying both entities within a professional association of payment establishments, paving the way for the Bridge Money interoperability application, which now lets users convert balances and send funds directly between Airtel Money and MTN Money accounts. Payment aggregators such as CinetPay, Flutterwave and PayDunya have layered e-commerce integrations on top of this base, bundling mobile money, bank cards and other payment rails into single checkout integrations for merchants — CinetPay in particular has become one of the most widely used aggregators across French-speaking Africa, including in Congo-Brazzaville.
Early-Stage Tech Innovation
Beyond telecom and fintech infrastructure, the Republic of Congo's startup and innovation ecosystem remains nascent but is beginning to take shape around the energy sector. French energy major TotalEnergies launched its own startup incubator in the country in 2019, which has supported digital ventures at the intersection of energy and technology, including AndrewTek, focused on energy optimization in buildings, and GazTech, which offers smart metering for LPG access — early examples of Congolese founders building software around the country's core extractive-and-energy economy rather than purely consumer-facing apps. In parallel, the government partnered with the World Bank to develop a digital skills incubator aimed at giving young Congolese free high-speed internet access alongside technical training, part of a broader attempt to seed a domestic talent pipeline rather than relying solely on imported connectivity and hardware.
Outlook
The Republic of Congo's digital story through the second half of 2026 will likely be defined less by new cable landings or towers and more by whether the government and regulator move on the GSMA's specific, costed reform list — tax removals, spectrum and licensing reform, mobile money regulatory coordination, and a National AI Strategy. With 86% 4G coverage already achieved but only 19% of the population online, the country has largely solved the supply-side infrastructure problem that many African markets still face; its remaining challenge is closing a demand-side gap rooted in affordability and digital skills. The FCFA 870 billion opportunity the GSMA has quantified gives Brazzaville a concrete economic case for acting quickly, but it also puts a number on the cost of inaction.
