New submarine cable capacity, a national AI strategy and a fresh data-governance framework are the building blocks of a state trying to diversify away from oil before debt service consumes the budget
A hydrocarbon economy under fiscal strain
The Republic of the Congo — commonly called Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from its much larger neighbour across the river — remains one of the most oil-dependent economies on the continent. Hydrocarbons account for more than 90% of the country's exports, according to the African Development Bank's most recent country outlook, while non-hydrocarbon activity generates only about 12% of GDP. That concentration leaves the budget acutely exposed to oil-price swings: the AfDB tracks a fiscal surplus that shrank from 2.9% of GDP in 2024 to just 1.4% in 2025, even as growth ticked up from 2.6% to a projected 3.1% over the same period. Debt service now consumes more than 85% of government revenue, a figure that leaves almost no fiscal room for anything beyond debt obligations and the most essential spending. Public debt has come down from 102% of GDP in 2023 to around 97% in 2025, with the AfDB projecting a further decline to 85% by 2027 — progress, but from a starting point that the IMF has previously flagged as a debt-distress risk.
It is against this backdrop — a state with limited fiscal space and an economy overwhelmingly reliant on a single depleting resource — that Brazzaville's digital push takes on strategic weight. The AfDB's own list of priority actions for the country includes accelerating the digitisation of tax administration specifically to raise domestic non-oil revenue, treating digital infrastructure not as a discretionary modernisation project but as part of the answer to a structural fiscal problem.
A cable landing that multiplied the country's bandwidth
The most consequential single infrastructure event of the past two years has been the activation of the 2Africa submarine cable at Pointe-Noire. MTN Congo announced the system's activation on 13 February 2026, establishing what the operator described as a direct link to London and, more importantly, a second independent international route alongside the ageing West Africa Cable System (WACS), which had been Congo's sole subsea connection since 2012. The scale of the upgrade is difficult to overstate: 2Africa carries 180 terabits per second of nominal capacity, compared with WACS's 14.5 Tbps, and the new system routes traffic via both South Africa and Nigeria, reducing the single-point-of-failure risk that had periodically left the country's international connectivity exposed to a single cable cut.
Research from the Fondation pour les études et recherches sur le développement international (FERDI), cited alongside the 2Africa rollout, found that doubling submarine cable capacity across Africa has historically been associated with a 32% immediate reduction in fixed broadband prices and price drops of up to 50% for mobile broadband — the kind of price effect that matters directly for a population where internet penetration was estimated at 36.2% (roughly 2.24 million users) with projections of reaching 62.48% by the end of 2024. To carry that new international capacity inland, Congo began construction in September 2023 of a second national fibre backbone linking Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville at 10-gigabit capacity, distributing 2Africa traffic between the country's two largest cities, though public progress updates on that domestic build-out have been sparse since.
5G, Wi-Fi and the Congo Digital 2025 framework
On the mobile side, MTN Congo launched commercial 5G service in October 2024 following a pilot that began in October 2022 and reportedly achieved data speeds above 10 Gbps. Fourth-generation coverage was targeted to reach 100% of the population by the end of 2024, with third-generation coverage projected at 98.85%, and nearly 300 public Wi-Fi access points had been installed across Pointe-Noire and Brazzaville by August 2024. These upgrades sit inside a broader policy architecture, the Congo Digital 2025 framework, structured around three pillars: digital public services, digital governance, and ICT-driven private sector growth. The Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and the Digital Economy has also moved to streamline operator licensing as part of that framework.
The financing behind this build-out has come substantially from development partners rather than the constrained national budget. A €136.5 million Digital Transformation Acceleration Project, backed jointly by the European Union, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank, is funding elements of the digital infrastructure and public-service rollout, while the African Development Bank has separately financed a US$72.8 million data centre project — investments that let Congo pursue digital modernisation without adding directly to the sovereign debt burden that already consumes most of its revenue.
Writing African languages into the AI strategy
Congo's approach to artificial intelligence has taken a distinctive, linguistically specific turn. In May 2026 the government, through the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and the Digital Economy and in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme, unveiled the groundwork for a national AI strategy built explicitly around Lingala and Kituba, two of the country's most widely spoken languages. A technical committee was given six months to produce eleven strategic outputs, moving through assessment and planning, sector-based consultations, and a final drafting phase culminating in a national strategy and a linguistic corpus for government approval. The initiative — budgeted at an estimated CFA150–200 million (roughly US$270,000–450,000) for logistics and consultation — aims to build linguistic databases that can support speech recognition, machine translation and AI-powered virtual assistants in Congolese national languages, addressing what officials describe as a structural bias in global AI systems, which they note continue to rely heavily on English, Chinese and other widely digitised languages for training data, leaving African languages underrepresented in the models being deployed across the continent.
That language-focused AI work sits alongside a parallel, broader effort on data governance. From 2 to 6 June 2026, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) conducted a country assessment mission in Congo under its continent-wide Data Governance in Africa initiative, followed on 8–9 June by a stakeholder engagement workshop and capacity-building programme that drew around 60 workshop participants and 50 capacity-building participants from government, academia, civil society and the private sector — including Google, through its Government AI Campus partnership. The programme, supported by Germany's GIZ, was designed to strengthen national capacity across data protection, cybersecurity, interoperability, digital infrastructure and AI governance, and included an AI Readiness Assessment intended to identify institutional capacity gaps ahead of the national data governance strategy the Ministry is now drafting.
Mobile money fills the gap left by thin banking penetration
As in much of Central Africa, formal banking penetration in Congo remains limited, and mobile money operated by the two dominant telecom groups, MTN and Airtel, has become the default rail for everyday payments and remittances. Both networks operate parallel mobile-money ecosystems, and interoperability between the two — allowing balances to move between an MTN MoMo account and an Airtel Money account — has been an active area of product development for local fintech intermediaries, reflecting the same fragmentation-versus-access dynamic seen in several other African mobile-money markets where multiple operators serve overlapping customer bases without a single dominant, interoperable rail.
The diversification test still to come
None of these initiatives — the 2Africa landing, the 5G rollout, the language-specific AI strategy, or the new data-governance framework — will by themselves resolve the fiscal arithmetic that has debt service consuming more than 85% of government revenue. What they represent is an attempt to build the infrastructure and institutional layers a digital economy needs before the oil revenue that currently funds most of the state budget goes into terminal decline. The AfDB's own prescription — accelerate tax digitisation to widen the non-oil revenue base — is a narrower and more immediate task than building a national AI ecosystem, and it is arguably the one that matters most for near-term fiscal survival. Whether Congo-Brazzaville can convert cheaper bandwidth and a more capable digital state into a meaningfully larger non-hydrocarbon economy, rather than simply a more connected version of the current one, will be the test of the next several budget cycles.
