DR Congo: the EIB grants funding to Bandwidth and Cloud Services to connect 2.5 million people to the Internet

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the countries on the African continent that still has the largest connectivity gap between rural and urban areas. The demand for connectivity in the country grew after Covid-19 and pushes local and even international companies to invest in it.

More than 2.5 million people living in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will benefit from faster, more economical and more reliable digital connectivity. A financing agreement to this effect was signed on Saturday, (March 4, 2023) between the European Investment Bank (EIB) and Bandwidth and Cloud Services Group (BCS).

The agreement provides for the granting of USD 10 million to BCS for the installation of 1,200 km of optical fiber over the 20,000 km that BCS plans to install in southern, central and eastern Africa over the next three years.

“Digital technologies are such a powerful engine of equity, inclusion and growth that the EU has made them a pillar of our Global Gateway strategy. The expansion of fiber optic infrastructure will allow local populations, schools and hospitals to benefit from mobile broadband, and will thus open up new opportunities for education, business, employment, and health care, “said Thomas Östros, Vice-President of the European Investment Bank.

It was last November, at AfricaCom 2022 in Cape Town, South Africa, that the funding was officially announced. This is the EIB’s first quasi-equity investment and the second cooperation with BCS. In 2018, BCS Group obtained long-term financing of USD 18 million from the EIB.

Thus, the investment will make it possible to connect areas currently poorly served by broadband telecommunications. It will promote the creation of jobs and the connection of 319 schools and 70 hospitals and health centers. According to Yonas Maru, founder and CEO of BCS Group, the investment will allow “significant progress to be made in the implementation of the memorandum of understanding between the DRC and BCS, which plans to connect more than 1,900 schools, 1,640 public hospitals and state institutions to the BCS backbone network and fiber optic urban infrastructure“