Written By | Torch Media Africa
Central Africa's largest economy is wiring itself into the continent's fibre and fintech grids — even as internet use lags far behind mobile phone ownership
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A Central African Economy Betting on Connectivity
Cameroon rarely tops the list of Africa's celebrated tech hubs — that reputation has historically gone to Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo or Kigali. But through 2025 and 2026, Central Africa's largest economy has been quietly assembling the pieces of a digital economy: new submarine cable connections, a state mandate to unify digital identity systems, a mobile-money market being prised open after years of duopoly, and a startup ecosystem still small in absolute terms but growing quickly off a low base. Together these developments describe a country trying to close an infrastructure gap before international capital and regional competitors close the window.
Breaking the Cable Bottleneck
For years, Cameroon's international bandwidth depended on a small number of submarine cable connections that, unlike shared regional systems, simply linked two countries without materially expanding the country's digital economy — the Nigeria-Cameroon Submarine Cable System (NCSCS), CEIBA-2 and SAIL among them. That changed with Cameroon's move to connect to the Medusa submarine cable system. Unlike its predecessors, Medusa links Cameroon directly to South Africa, Europe, the Maghreb and Southeast Asia, giving the country genuinely multidirectional connectivity rather than a single point-to-point link. Cameroon's government finalized a memorandum of understanding to join the Medusa system, with local reporting from Business in Cameroon estimating the state's share of the link's cost at close to CFA 32.8 billion (roughly $55 million).
On the data-center side, ST Digital — a Cameroon-based digital infrastructure company — has been expanding beyond its home market, building additional data centres in Gabon, Côte d'Ivoire and Togo to support regional cloud services, while working with submarine cable operators to interconnect the resulting four-country network, according to reporting by TechCabal. That regional posture suggests Cameroonian firms see an opportunity to become infrastructure exporters to neighbouring Central and West African markets rather than remaining purely domestic players. Camtel, the state telecom operator, also continues to operate its own data center at Zamengoe, one of only two dedicated facilities currently tracked inside the country.
A National Push on Digital Identity
Cameroon's government has also moved to consolidate its fragmented digital-identity landscape. At the opening of the 2026 Internet Governance Forum in Yaoundé, Minister of Posts and Telecommunications Minette Libom Li Likeng mandated Camtel to build national digital-ID interoperability, framing the effort around the need for infrastructure, platforms and services that can interact securely while complying with data-protection and data-sovereignty rules. The mandate reflects a broader continental pattern — seen in identity pushes from Nigeria to Benin to Somalia — in which governments are trying to move from fragmented sectoral ID systems (voter rolls, tax IDs, SIM registration databases) toward a single interoperable backbone that can underpin everything from banking know-your-customer requirements to social-program targeting. For Cameroon, handing the interoperability mandate to the state operator rather than a private consortium also signals an intent to keep the resulting identity infrastructure under sovereign control.
Mobile Money's Duopoly Faces New Entrants
Cameroon's mobile-money market has long been split between two telecom-linked giants: MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money, which together handle more than 80% of the country's electronic transactions, according to The Fintech Times' 2026 review of the market. With more than 12 million mobile-money users recorded in 2025, the country ranks among the more dynamic fintech markets in Central Africa, even if it trails West African leaders like Ghana, Senegal or Nigeria in absolute scale.
That duopoly is now facing its first serious challenge in years. Camtel — already mandated to build digital-ID interoperability — announced plans to enter the mobile-money market directly with a new platform called Blue Money, capitalized at an initial CFA 500 million and chaired by Jean Marie Aimé Ottou, according to Business in Cameroon and Ecofin Agency reporting. Camtel's dual role as both a would-be identity backbone operator and a new mobile-money entrant gives the state-owned company an unusual degree of leverage over the country's emerging digital-finance infrastructure. Separately, the arrival of US fintech Wave — which has already disrupted mobile-money pricing in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Uganda with aggressively low transaction fees — has begun to put competitive pressure on the MTN-Orange duopoly's margins in Cameroon as well.
The broader effect has been a modest e-commerce boom: online commerce in Cameroon grew by 35% between 2024 and 2026, according to trade and fintech industry trackers, as improved payment rails made it easier for merchants to accept digital payment outside the two dominant telecom wallets. More than 70 technology startups now operate in the country, a number that includes a growing cluster of fintech firms building payment platforms and digital banking infrastructure around this newly competitive base layer.
Silicon Mountain and a Startup Scene Still Finding Scale
Cameroon's startup ecosystem remains small by continental standards but is growing quickly in relative terms. StartupBlink's rankings show the ecosystem expanding 32.3% in 2026, placing Cameroon 113th globally, with roughly 75 tracked startups and cumulative startup funding just over $1.38 million by StartupBlink's count — a modest figure that reflects how early-stage the formal venture ecosystem remains. Separate data from Tracxn shows $5.82 million raised across a single equity funding round in Cameroon through December 2025, illustrating both how concentrated and how small individual deals still are relative to peer markets like Nigeria or Kenya, where nine-figure raises have become almost routine.
Geographically, the ecosystem clusters around three hubs: ActivSpaces in the economic capital Douala, Mountain Hub in the political capital Yaoundé, and — most distinctively — Silicon Mountain, the tech cluster centred on the university city of Buea in the Fako division of Cameroon's Southwest Region. Since 2015, the Buea tech community has organized an annual Silicon Mountain conference drawing more than 500 developers, entrepreneurs and creatives from across the wider Mountain Area and beyond, and the hubs collectively provide free office space, connectivity, mentorship and — increasingly — advocacy for legislation that would make it easier to convert small and medium enterprises into venture-fundable startups.
The Connectivity Gap Beneath the Headlines
For all this infrastructure activity, Cameroon's actual internet usage still lags sharply behind phone ownership. DataReportal's Digital 2026 report for Cameroon found 29.0 million cellular mobile connections active in the country in late 2025 — equivalent to 96.4% of the total population — but only 12.6 million individuals actually using the internet, an online penetration rate of just 41.9%. Social media use is lower still, at 5.90 million user identities, or 19.6% of the population, as of October 2025. That gap between near-universal mobile-phone connectivity and much lower actual internet use is a common pattern across Central and francophone West Africa, and it underscores that many of Cameroon's mobile connections are limited to voice and SMS services rather than genuine data access — meaning the cable landings, data centers and mobile-money competition described above are, for now, benefiting a minority of Cameroonians directly, even as they build the backbone that broader adoption will eventually run on.
What Comes Next
Three developments will determine how quickly Cameroon converts this infrastructure build-out into broader digital inclusion. First, whether the Medusa cable connection and ST Digital's regional data-center network translate into lower data prices and better urban broadband, rather than simply improving backhaul capacity that consumers never feel directly. Second, whether Camtel's digital-ID interoperability mandate and its Blue Money mobile-money launch reinforce each other to create a genuinely competitive, interoperable digital-finance layer — or whether concentrating both roles in one state operator recreates a new form of the same market concentration Cameroon is trying to escape. Third, and most fundamentally, whether the 41.9% internet-penetration rate begins closing the gap with near-universal mobile-phone ownership, which will depend as much on affordability and digital literacy as on any single cable or data center.
