Technological Transformation
The most connected 13 per cent
Almost every account of technology in Africa begins with a connectivity number, and South Sudan's is bracing. DataReportal's Digital 2026 report, compiled from ITU, GSMA Intelligence and platform data as of October 2025, counts 1.61 million internet users in a population of 12.2 million — an adoption rate of 13.2%, meaning 10.6 million South Sudanese, or 86.8% of the country, were offline at the end of 2025. Mobile connections stood at 5.89 million, equivalent to just 48.1% of the population, one of very few national markets anywhere where cellular connections do not exceed the number of people.
The direction of travel is nonetheless steep. Internet users grew by 113,000 (+7.5%) over the year, mobile connections by 868,000 (+17.3%), and social media identities by 233,000 (+30.5%) to 997,000. TikTok alone reported 562,000 adult users — roughly 34.9% of the entire internet user base. The country's own regulator, the National Communication Authority, publishes higher figures still, citing a rise from 1.36 million to 1.9 million internet users and 4.47 million mobile connections, for penetration near 15.7%. That gap between regulator and independent estimate is itself a data-governance problem: a state cannot plan digital public infrastructure when it disagrees with the world about how many of its citizens are online.
Underlying all of this is geography. South Sudan is landlocked and has no submarine cable landing of its own. Its international bandwidth reaches the sea through terrestrial fibre links to neighbours and onward access to coastal systems — a topology that makes resilience a function of cross-border politics as much as engineering.
Starlink as de facto national infrastructure
The single largest change to that topology in recent years did not come from a fibre build. Starlink launched commercially in South Sudan in July 2024 after roughly two years of negotiation, with the NCA granting a Satellite Landing Rights Licence and a Provisional Service Licence and subsequently approving a four-tier tariff structure running from $38.19 to $5,005.40 per month. The regulator framed the licence as an affordability measure and has since warned against importing terminals through unauthorised distributors, invoking the National Communications Act of 2012.
In practice, satellite broadband has become the connectivity of last resort for the institutions that keep the country running: NGOs, media organisations, banks and larger traders in towns where terrestrial coverage is thin or absent. Reporting from Juba is candid that the cost places it beyond most households and small traders, so its effect has been to deepen a two-tier market — reliable connectivity for organisations that can pay in dollars, intermittent GSM for everyone else. Insecurity along rural transport corridors has discouraged telecom operators from extending terrestrial networks, and years of conflict have concentrated population in urban centres, so the geographic inequality compounds rather than erodes.
The payments layer that the state did not build
South Sudan's most consequential digital system is its mobile money network, and it was assembled entirely by private operators. m-Gurush — a partnership between Trinity Technologies and Zain South Sudan, licensed by the central bank and the NCA — and Nilepay launched in 2019 as the country's first mobile money services; MTN subsequently brought MoMo to the market. The Bank of South Sudan has recognised mobile money as a valid legal form of payment, and the platforms now function as the primary payments rail for a population where formal bank accounts are rare, processing billions of South Sudanese pounds a day.
They also fail regularly. Reporting from Juba's Konyo-konyo market and from Bor describes a familiar cycle: network outages, platform downtime and agent liquidity shortages strand transactions mid-flight, sellers refuse to release goods without confirmation, and both parties revert to cash. Because wholesalers demand cash, retailers demand cash; because retailers demand cash, users withdraw mobile money the moment it arrives. The result is a circular dependency in which usage rises while trust does not — arguably the defining condition of South Sudanese fintech.
The state's attempt to intervene here is the clearest instance of the missing layer being retrofitted. In February 2025 the Bank of South Sudan announced, with the AfricaNenda Foundation, plans for the country's first national instant payment system enabling real-time transfers and interoperability between banks, mobile money providers and other financial institutions. The South Sudan Interbank Payment and Settlement System went live on 10 October 2025, supporting instant transfers, bulk salary payments and electronic government transactions. On 4 November 2025 the central bank ordered every licensed commercial bank to connect to SSIPSS by 31 January 2026 or face a $100,000 fine — an unusually blunt enforcement mechanism that tells you how much resistance the regulator expected. Businesses still report that not all banks are fully integrated and that manual workarounds persist.
A presidential order against bureaucratic inertia
The second retrofit is administrative. South Sudan ranked 192nd of 193 countries in the United Nations' 2024 E-Government Development Index — effectively last. In December 2025 President Salva Kiir issued a Republican Order granting the E-Service Board full authority to digitise all government institutions, a step announced publicly by Thomas Gatkuoth Nyak, Undersecretary in the Ministry of Telecommunications and Postal Services and chair of the board. Institutions were given until January 2026 to comply, with officials stating plainly that digitisation was no longer optional.
The board's remit covers payments, licensing, records management and inter-institutional communication, with a national e-services portal already live. The framing is revealing: the order was designed principally to remove bureaucratic obstruction inside the public sector rather than to fund new technology. In a system where officials have historically derived income from discretionary control of paper processes, the political economy of digitisation is the hard part, not the software.
Ten million people without legal identity
The deepest gap sits underneath all of it. The World Bank's Identity for Development programme released a South Sudan Country Diagnostic in 2026 finding that roughly 90% of citizens lack a government-issued identity document — more than 10 million people in a population of 12.2 million. Without a shared identity layer, the country's biometric payroll systems, humanitarian registries and mobile money databases operate in isolation, unable to authenticate against one another. Authorities are now planning to digitise civil registration and the national ID system together, linking birth registration in health facilities directly to the civil registry through a multisectoral effort spanning the ministries of Justice, Interior and Health. The ID4D diagnostic's central recommendation is legal rather than technical: strengthen the framework before scaling enrolment.
Meanwhile, the most reliable digital identity infrastructure in the country belongs to no ministry at all. Aid organisations run large-scale biometric registration and digital cash transfer systems covering millions of displaced people, and health information platforms operated by the Ministry of Health with WHO and UNICEF support continue functioning through political crises when civilian government systems do not. These are, in effect, South Sudan's operational digital public infrastructure — but they are donor-funded, proprietary, closed-source and disconnected from national registries. They deliver services without transferring capability.
Governance risk as an engineering constraint
Two governance gaps bound how far any of this can scale. The first is data protection: South Sudan has no operational data protection regime, and the government has said it intends to introduce a first Data Protection Bill in 2026. Building a national identity system before that law exists inverts the sequence most peer countries followed.
The second is the precedent of the switch. On 22 January 2025 the NCA directed all internet service providers to block social media for up to 90 days, citing sections 9(6)(f) and 34(6) of the National Communication Act of 2012, after graphic footage from neighbouring Sudan circulated online. The order was rescinded on 27 January, five days later, following pressure from Access Now, Amnesty International and domestic civil society including the Internet Society's South Sudan chapter. The block was short. Its signalling effect was not: an economy whose payments, commerce and remittances run over consumer internet now knows that access is revocable by regulatory directive, which is a rational reason for a trader to keep holding cash.
The sequencing problem
The conventional model of digital development — identity, then payments, then services, then private innovation — is not what happened here. South Sudan got informal digital commerce first, on WhatsApp and Facebook Marketplace; mobile money second, from telecom operators; humanitarian biometrics third, from donors; satellite broadband fourth, from a foreign private operator; and only now, in 2025 and 2026, is the state assembling interoperable payment rails, an enforceable digitisation mandate, a national ID plan and a data protection bill.
That inversion is not merely untidy. It means the public layer must be retrofitted around private systems whose owners have no obligation to interoperate, whose standards are closed, and whose continued operation is a commercial decision. Small developers cannot build on registries they cannot access; open data that would support logistics, pricing transparency and market entry barely exists. The country's digital economy is real, growing and genuinely useful to the people using it. Whether it becomes infrastructure — publicly governed, interoperable, and durable through the next network outage or political shock — is the question the next two years will answer.
