23 May 2024

The project will be supported by Euro52.47 million from the African Development Bank and Euro14.5 million from the government of the Republic of Congo, totalling Euro66.55 million. This project includes the installation of 600km of fibre optic cable on major interconnecting routes with Cameroon (341km) and the Central African Republic (281km) via the Congo River, and the construction of the data centre.

The building will soon serve as the centre for storing and processing the digital data of the Republic of Congo. Additionally, it will house various applications developed or acquired in the Congo Basin, the world's second largest ‘green lung.’

"Congo will soon be the only country in Central Africa to have its own data centre," said the coordinator of the Central Africa Fibre-Optic Backbone project, which includes Congo. "Ultimately, the videoconferences we run here will no longer go through a server in Europe, America, or elsewhere before coming back to us. Everything will happen right here."

The Bank noted that around Euro13.8 million of the total has been allocated to build and run the data centre. As part of the Congo component of the Central Africa Fibre-Optic Backbone Project, we received funding from the African Development Bank to build a data centre, and now we're constructing a three-story building that can be extended to include a basement.”

The new data centre will allow all public data to be stored in Congo, as well as the data of telecom operators, banks, insurance companies, and other private firms, including backups of any primary storage sites they use.

Once the work is finished, the data centere will be managed by a delegate (public or private), who will be responsible not only for management but also for marketing and infrastructure maintenance, according to the African Development Bank.