Written By | Torch Media Africa
As hydrocarbon output shrinks the economy, Malabo turns to a state telecom overhaul, a second submarine cable and a fledgling digital-agenda push to build a post-oil foundation
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SCIENCE & TECH
Equatorial Guinea's economy contracted by an estimated 6.0% to 6.4% in 2025, according to the African Development Bank and International Monetary Fund respectively, as oil production fell roughly 16.8% amid temporary shutdowns, aging fields and a lack of new production sites. The AfDB projects only a tepid rebound to 0.2% growth in 2026, contingent entirely on the trajectory of hydrocarbon output — a sector that has been in near-continuous decline for over a decade. Public debt rose from 36.4% of GDP in 2024 to 39.2% at the end of 2025, and the budget deficit widened to 2.1% of GDP from 0.6% the year before, as declining oil revenue collided with limited room to cut spending. The IMF approved the third review of a Staff-Monitored Program with Equatorial Guinea in February 2026, part of a broader effort to steady public finances while Malabo tries to build something to stand on once the oil runs out. Increasingly, that something is digital infrastructure.
ADIGE and the Digital Pillar of Horizon 2035
Equatorial Guinea's National Development Plan, known as Agenda 2035 or Horizon 2035, formally introduced technology and innovation as a cross-cutting theme in 2021, placing the digital economy at the center of a diversification strategy built around what officials describe as blue, green, yellow and digital economic pillars alongside tourism. The operational vehicle for the digital piece is the Digital Agenda for Equatorial Guinea, known by its Spanish acronym ADIGE, a World Bank-supported strategic plan implemented by the Ministry of Transport, Post and New Information and Communications Technologies. ADIGE has four stated objectives: universalizing access to telecommunications services, digitizing administrative procedures, supporting and strengthening the ICT sector, and building citizens' capacity to use digital tools. The World Bank formalized its assessment of the country's starting point in a June 2024 Digital Economy Diagnostic, prepared under the Bank's Digital Economy for Africa initiative, which evaluated Equatorial Guinea against five foundational elements — digital infrastructure, digital public platforms, digital financial services, digital businesses and digital skills — as part of the continent-wide push to have every African individual, business and government digitally enabled by 2030.
GETESA's Overhaul: 5G, Fiber and a Mobile Money Platform
The clearest sign of urgency arrived in mid-2026, when state telecom operator GETESA, under new chief executive Charles Borome Razafimahatratra, presented a modernization plan to Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue. The plan follows an audit by consulting firm Cyberteq, whose findings — presented in April 2026 — identified major shortcomings in network capacity, equipment and technical planning, alongside aging infrastructure, slow data transmission speeds and dropped calls caused by network congestion. GETESA's first 12-month phase, launched in June 2026, targets optimization of the national telecommunications network, expansion of mobile and internet coverage, and a broader digital transformation of the company through new equipment purchases. Among its more consequential elements: the reactivation of a fiber-optic network that until now has been used exclusively by the national electricity company, SEGESA, to link its power substations — repurposing existing infrastructure rather than building new capacity from scratch. The plan also calls for 5G service introduction, public Wi-Fi in Malabo, Bata and the planned capital of Oyala, restoration of international roaming, eSIM technology, and full digitization of GETESA's own operations through a paperless management system intended to cut logistics costs. Perhaps most notably for financial inclusion, GETESA plans to launch Getesa Money, a new electronic payments platform that would give the state operator a direct foothold in mobile financial services.
Closing the Connectivity Gap: A Second Submarine Cable
Equatorial Guinea's international bandwidth has long depended on limited submarine cable capacity, a bottleneck officials and outside consultants agree constrains everything from cloud adoption to e-government reliability. Two parallel efforts are underway to change that. In February 2026, Equatorial Guinea signed a cooperation agreement with Nigeria for the deployment of new submarine fiber-optic infrastructure intended to strengthen regional digital integration and reduce the country's reliance on a single point of international connectivity. Separately, consulting firm Mason recommended in April 2026 that Equatorial Guinea connect to the Medusa cable system, which would serve as the country's second major international undersea link. That project is estimated to cost between €20 million and €60 million (roughly $23 million to $70 million) and is projected to become operational between 2029 and 2030 — a multi-year runway that underscores how far out some of the country's connectivity fixes still sit, even as the GETESA overhaul aims for nearer-term improvements to domestic network quality.
Mobile Money and Fintech: Starting From a Small Base
By the numbers, Equatorial Guinea's digital economy remains modest even relative to other small Central African markets. DataReportal figures put the country at 885,000 mobile subscribers at the end of 2025 — a mobile penetration rate of 45.4% — and 1.18 million internet users, equivalent to 60.4% of the roughly 1.7 million population, among the higher internet-penetration rates in Central Africa despite the connectivity constraints described above. The fintech and digital financial services sector is correspondingly thin: industry estimates suggest fewer than five to ten dedicated fintech or digital financial service providers currently operate in the country, with regional players such as Orange Money — active across several Central African markets, offering money transfers, bill payments and airtime top-ups — providing the primary entry point into digital finance for most users. GETESA's planned entry with Getesa Money would mark one of the first state-backed attempts to expand that base meaningfully, though the World Bank's 2024 diagnostic flagged digital financial services as one of the weaker of the five foundational pillars it assessed, alongside digital skills and digital businesses.
A Nascent Startup Ecosystem
Equatorial Guinea's formal startup and technology-business landscape remains small. Business databases tracking the country list around 51 active companies spanning sectors from aviation services to employment platforms, a far smaller cohort than found in West or East African hubs of comparable or even smaller population size. Horizon 2035 planning documents point to agro-processing, renewable energy and business-to-business service companies as the segments authorities hope to cultivate alongside the digital push, but unlike Rwanda's Kigali Innovation City or Senegal's Wave-anchored fintech scene, Equatorial Guinea has yet to produce a signature homegrown technology success story. The World Bank's diagnostic and ADIGE's own four-objective framework both implicitly acknowledge this: before a startup ecosystem can take root, the country first needs reliable connectivity, digitized government services, and a workforce with baseline digital skills — the infrastructure layer GETESA and the ADIGE program are now, belatedly, trying to build.
Outlook
Equatorial Guinea's digital transformation push is, in effect, a hedge against a hydrocarbon sector that both the AfDB and IMF now describe in terms of structural decline rather than cyclical dip. The country has genuine assets to work with: relatively high internet penetration for its region, a state operator now under pressure to modernize after an unflattering independent audit, two potential paths to added international bandwidth, and a national development plan that has formally elevated digital economy to a top-tier diversification pillar since 2021. What it does not yet have is evidence that any of this translates into the kind of self-sustaining private-sector digital economy — fintech unicorns, venture capital inflows, a dense startup pipeline — that has begun to take shape elsewhere on the continent. With GETESA's first modernization phase running through mid-2027 and the Medusa cable decision still years from delivering added capacity, 2026 looks less like a turning point for Equatorial Guinea's digital economy than the year the groundwork finally got laid.
