A new digital lifeline is now live across Central and East Africa. Pan-African telecom giant Paratus Group has switched on a 2,000-kilometre overland fibre corridor linking Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, a move experts say could transform the region’s digital landscape.
The Goma-to-Mombasa (G2M) route, developed in partnership with ROKE TELKOM, creates a high-capacity terrestrial “backbone” connecting inland markets directly to global subsea cables — bypassing the vulnerabilities of coastal-only connections.
The corridor threads through key economic hubs — entity[“city”,”Nairobi”,”kenya”], entity[“city”,”Kampala”,”uganda”], and Kigali — and ties into carrier-neutral data centres, enabling faster, low-latency data transfer, and significantly boosting cross-border network resilience.
“This isn’t just fibre; it’s a digital highway that finally links inland economies directly to the world,” said Martin Cox, chief commercial officer at Paratus. “Operators and enterprises now have secure, reliable access to international capacity, something that was previously hard to come by.”
The Ugandan node underscores ROKE TELKOM’s pivotal role in the project. Peter Muhumuza, the company’s chief technical officer, said:
“Laying fibre is the easy part. The real value comes when it’s connected to cloud-ready data centres like Roke Cloud. That’s what makes businesses resilient — fast, secure, and local access to the cloud.”
Roke Cloud, a sister company operating from Raxio Uganda, offers carrier-neutral infrastructure designed for enterprise-grade uptime and cloud adjacency.
For Uganda, the corridor could be a game-changer. Despite expanding fibre networks, high data costs, expensive devices, and the country’s landlocked status have long restricted access, especially in rural areas. Power outages and limited digital literacy have further left high-speed internet concentrated in urban centres.
Now active and carrying traffic, the G2M corridor is expected to bolster a region projected by Euromonitor to generate 29% of Africa’s GDP by 2040. Analysts predict it will fuel fintech, cross-border trade, and public service digitisation — all while insulating inland markets from subsea cable outages.
As Paratus continues its continental push, the G2M fibre highway highlights how large-scale infrastructure and local partnerships are finally bridging Africa’s digital divide — turning ambitious plans into tangible connectivity.
