As part of a World Bank engagement, the teams of Salience Consulting, Roland Berger and TechPool Africa have just completed an intensive fact‑finding mission in Côte d’Ivoire to map the country’s evolving digital landscape. The mission aimed to engage key public and private stakeholders and assess the maturity of data centre, cloud, AI and energy infrastructure, contributing to establish robust foundations for true Digital Sovereignty, securing trusted data governance in Côte d’Ivoire, and across West Africa.
This foundational work required engaging a complex ecosystem of stakeholders:
-Governance & Regulation: Discussions with the Ministry of Digital Transition, ARTCI, and ANSSI focused on legal frameworks, national cloud strategy, and modernizing data protection policies.
-Infrastructure Providers: Exchanges with Huawei Data Center, RAXIO, ST DIGITAL, and VITIB assessed market maturity, hosting capabilities, and the crucial balance between public and private cloud models.
-Energy & Development Partners:Meetings with BNETD, CI ENERGIES, and GS2E addressed regional connectivity, energy efficiency, and resilience all critical for sustainable, sovereign data hosting.
Global Partnership Focus: We continued to work closely with development partners, including the AFDB, #EUDelegation, #ENABEL, and #GIZ. Their engagement underscored how central Côte d’Ivoire’s digital governance framework is to advancing its overall digital sovereignty and investment readiness.
Private Sector Engagement: Consultations with private sector actors continued beyond the field mission, reflecting their central role as both drivers of innovation and essential connectors between grassroots initiatives and scalable AI use cases. Their perspectives are critical to bridging local needs with deployable solutions, ensuring that emerging data ecosystems translate into tangible value creation and sustainable digital development.
The Core Shift: From Data Infrastructure to Data Value Creation:A central pillar of the work ahead will be to move from “data infrastructure” to “data value creation”–leveraging secure cloud environments and interoperable data spaces to generate economic, social and environmental impact in priority sectors such as agriculture, forestry and climate action. Building on emerging African and AU‑EU initiatives on data governance, this means treating data not as a by‑product of digital systems, but as a strategic asset for resilience, inclusive growth and sustainable socio‑economic development across the continent.
This mission marks an important step towards co‑designing:
-risk‑based data classification regimes,
-adaptive regulatory frameworks for cloud and AI, and
-a federated multi‑cloud environment capable of enabling sovereign, trusted and value‑creating data ecosystems in Côte d’Ivoire and the wider ECOWAS region.
A big thanks as well to our partners #DigitalPartners and Fidal who provided us their professional support for the preparation of the mission.
