When the Democratic Republic of Congo unveiled its National Digital Plan 2026–2030 in October 2025, the headline number was the story: €8.7 billion across five years to digitise a country of 100 million people operating on 5,150 telecom towers and 30.5 per cent internet penetration. Africa’s largest country by area, fourth largest by population, committing to one of the continent’s biggest infrastructure buildouts.
Five months on, the more revealing story is the gap between that commitment and the capital actually in hand. The DRC government has secured $1 billion in domestic funding and approximately $500 million in confirmed international partner commitments — giving it roughly $1.5 billion against a plan requiring nearly six times that amount. How Kinshasa fills the remaining €7-plus billion will determine whether the plan is a transformation or a roadmap with no funding.
The Confirmed DFI Pipeline
The clearest sign that serious financing is moving came in February 2026, when the DRC Ministry of Digital Economy held a high-level working session with the World Bank and France’s Agence Française de Développement (AFD) to accelerate a $500 million digital transformation initiative. The funding targets connectivity infrastructure linking major cities, e-governance digitisation, and skills development — squarely aligned with the National Digital Plan’s first three pillars. The package is the most substantial confirmed DFI commitment to the PNN2 since the plan was announced.
The European Investment Bank is separately active. Its project supporting Bandwidth and Cloud Services (BCS), a DRC fibre operator, predates the national plan but is now functionally part of the buildout architecture. EIB involvement carries a specific significance: it signals to other Western development finance institutions that the DRC’s regulatory and contractual environment has cleared a minimum credibility threshold for long-term infrastructure lending.
A third potential financing anchor — an Indian firm, General Technologies, that signed a $1 billion MoU with Kinshasa in February 2025 — remains unverified as an active commitment. MoUs in African digital infrastructure have a long and frequently unrealised history. Until General Technologies’ terms become binding and its track record in comparable infrastructure deployments can be assessed, this should be treated as pipeline, not capital.
The African Development Bank is a logical additional partner — the institution’s co-launched $10 billion AI and digital initiative with UNDP explicitly targets the same connectivity, compute, and skills pillars as the DRC’s plan — but no specific DRC commitment has been announced. Afreximbank, frequently cited as a potential regional infrastructure lender, similarly has no confirmed role.
Adding confirmed commitments together — government funding, World Bank/AFD, and EIB — the DRC has secured something in the range of $2 billion toward its €8.7 billion target. The shortfall is roughly €6.5 billion. At the plan’s current run rate of confirmed external financing, that gap does not close by 2030.
Tower Economics: The 5,000-Per-Year Challenge
The infrastructure target inside the plan that most directly tests execution capacity is the tower rollout: from 5,150 today to 30,000 by 2030. That requires adding approximately 5,000 towers per year, every year, for five years. For context, the DRC has never built at anything close to that pace.
Helios Towers is the dominant tower infrastructure operator in the DRC — and, tellingly, the country is Helios’s highest-revenue market among its eight-country African footprint. That is a measure of how much existing capacity depends on a single towerco, and how much of the planned expansion will require Helios’s active participation or a credible competitor entering the market. IHS Towers, the continent’s largest operator, is concentrated in Nigeria and West Africa with limited confirmed DRC presence. American Tower’s Sub-Saharan Africa footprint does not include the DRC.
The most immediate tower capacity signal is the Vodacom DRC and Orange DRC shared-infrastructure programme, which began deploying 2,000 solar-powered towers over six years from January 2025 — a pace of roughly 330 towers per year under a joint venture model targeting 19 million rural Congolese. That programme is real and funded. It accounts for less than half a year’s worth of towers at the pace the national plan requires.
The economics of DRC tower deployment are challenging in ways that pure capital calculations understate. Only 19 per cent of the country has reliable grid electricity — meaning the vast majority of new towers require solar and battery systems that add capital and maintenance cost to every site. At scale, a solar-powered tower in a remote DRC territory costs materially more to build and operate than a grid-connected site in urban Nigeria or Ghana. The national plan’s tower ambition is achievable in principle; in practice, it requires a pipeline of tower developers, energy suppliers, and site operators that does not yet exist at the necessary scale.
The UIL Contract: A Due Diligence Flag
On 20 October 2025, the DRC government concluded a $150 million agreement with Mauritius-based United Investment LMT (UIL) covering feasibility studies, the nationwide rollout of 60,000 to 80,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable, the installation of a new 192-terabit-per-second submarine cable, and the construction of three data centres including a flagship Tier III facility in Kinshasa. The deal was presented as a significant component of the national infrastructure programme.
The editorial brief that commissioned this piece flagged UIL as a mandatory due diligence item. That instinct is correct.
The scope of work priced at $150 million is not plausible as a fixed-price contract. A single transoceanic or coastal submarine cable system of 192 Tbps capacity — comparable in scale to systems like 2Africa — typically costs $300 to $500 million to engineer, deploy, and land, before operating costs. Adding 80,000 kilometres of terrestrial fibre and three data centres would multiply that figure several times over. The $150 million figure may represent an initial phase or feasibility stage, but the public communication of the deal has not drawn that distinction clearly.
UIL (United Investment LMT) is distinct from United Investments Limited, the Mauritius-listed conglomerate active in fertilisers, agribusiness, and IT services. BETAR’s review of publicly available records found no verifiable prior deployment history for UIL in submarine cable infrastructure or large-scale fibre rollouts. No implementation timeline was disclosed at signing. No independent project finance or DFI co-lending structure has been announced alongside the deal.
For the avoidance of doubt: the separately real submarine cable development in the DRC is the 2Africa landing. In November 2025, Meta confirmed completion of the core 2Africa system. Orange DRC and Airtel Congo, operating through their joint venture Mawezi RDC SA, landed the 2Africa cable at Muanda on the DRC’s Atlantic coast — giving the country its first direct landing on a modern high-capacity system. 2Africa’s West Africa segment carries 180 Tbps of design capacity across eight fibre pairs. That is confirmed infrastructure, with named operators and verified financing.
UIL’s 192 Tbps cable is a separate, unverified proposition. Development finance institutions evaluating DRC digital infrastructure exposure should treat the two as entirely distinct categories.
The Prize That Justifies the Risk
The case for pushing through the financing gap is not abstract. A successfully digitised DRC — with national broadband coverage, a functioning interbank payments platform, and a tower density approaching its 30,000-site target — would be transformative for Central Africa as a whole. Six of the DRC’s nine neighbours are landlocked and economically dependent on Congolese transit corridors. A national payments platform designed for interoperability could serve as the settlement backbone for cross-border commerce across the region. Digital identity and e-government infrastructure, once built, is reusable across healthcare, taxation, and education systems that currently operate on paper.
The government’s own projection — $4.1 billion added to GDP by 2029, 700,000 digital jobs created — may be optimistic on timing, but the directional case is sound. The DRC has the raw demand, the demographic momentum, and now, for the first time, a government minister who has demonstrated genuine technology fluency and international engagement.
What it does not yet have is €6.5 billion in committed capital and a contractor ecosystem capable of deploying 5,000 towers per year. Those are the gaps that will define whether the National Digital Plan is Africa’s most ambitious infrastructure story — or its most detailed unfulfilled promise.
Key Data Points
- Plan total: €8.7 billion (2026–2030)
- Secured funding: ~$1.5B ($1B government + $500M international)
- Financing gap: approximately €6.5–7.2 billion
- Tower target: 5,150 → 30,000 by 2030 (~5,000 new towers/year required)
- Confirmed DFI: World Bank + AFD ($500M, Feb 2026); EIB (BCS fibre, ongoing)
- Dominant towerco: Helios Towers (highest-revenue DRC market; 14,000 towers across 8 African markets)
- Confirmed submarine cable: 2Africa — landed at Muanda by Mawezi RDC SA (Orange DRC + Airtel joint venture); 180 Tbps design capacity; core system completed Nov 2025
- UIL deal: $150M signed Oct 2025; scope claims 80,000 km fibre + 192 Tbps submarine cable + 3 data centres; no implementation timeline disclosed; entity’s deployment track record unverified
- Current internet penetration: 30.5% (34.7M users, end-2025)
- Grid electricity access: 19% — requiring solar-powered tower deployments across most of the rollout
