Meta & SSA: Accelerating Digital Transformation

A new report by Public First explores Meta’s role in supporting Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital transformation. The report looks at how Meta’s infrastructure investments, digital platforms, and open-source tools are helping businesses reach customers, enabling developers to build locally relevant tools, and strengthening the foundations of the region’s digital economy.

Our research found that across Sub-Saharan Africa, entrepreneurs, developers, and businesses are building a digital economy on course to more than double from $130 billion today to $300 billion by 2035. African innovators are driving this expansion, but they face some barriers, including limited international bandwidth that makes real-time service delivery difficult, high costs that reduce market access, and technological constraints that limit participation in the AI revolution.

Meta’s investments in digital infrastructure - spanning subsea cables, terrestrial backhaul, and edge infrastructure - respond to these barriers, helping reduce the costs and constraints that African businesses and entrepreneurs face. In 2025, these investments generated an estimated $16 billion in combined economic value across the region, supporting businesses and consumers across Sub-Saharan Africa, enabling the development of new services, expansion into new markets, and improvements in customer service.

Key findings from the report include:

• Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital economy is projected to more than double from $130 billion today to $300 billion by 2035
• In 2025, Meta’s investments in digital infrastructure - from subsea fibre optic investments to edge infrastructure - generated an estimated $16 billion in economic value for businesses and consumers across Sub-Saharan Africa.
• By delivering up to 180 Tbps of capacity, more than all pre-existing cables combined, 2Africa enables new categories of digital activity, including real-time telemedicine platforms, cloud-based education tools, AI applications requiring low latency, and remote work capabilities.
• We estimate that by 2035, 2Africa will have brought 90 million additional Africans online.
• Meta’s open-source AI models, such as LLaMA and No Language Left Behind, could support an estimated $23 billion in economic value for Sub-Saharan Africa’s digital economy over the next decade.
• 81% of online adults in Sub-Saharan Africa agree that AI products developed within Sub-Saharan Africa will be important for the continent’s economic growth.
• 66% of online business leaders surveyed say that they would use open-source AI tools if they were available and accessible.

Alongside the SSA report, Public First has produced four country studies exploring how Meta’s technologies, platforms and infrastructure are supporting digital transformation in Kenya, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa. These reports look in more detail at the role Meta plays in each market, from helping small businesses reach customers and supporting digital trade, to enabling innovation and widening participation in the digital economy.

Read the full SSA report here.

Read the methodology here.

Read the Côte d’Ivoire report here.

Read the Kenya report here.

Read the Nigeria report here.

Read the South Africa report here.