BRITISH foreign secretary Mr Dominic Raab last week visited the East African Data Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, during which tour he unveiled his Britain’s support for developing countries to shift to clean energy and transport.


The centre, which is Africa’s largest data centre is owned by Liquid Telecom, a subsidiary of Econet Global.

Posting on his official Twitter handle last week, Mr Raab said: “I visited Liquid Telecom data centre in Nairobi to announce £48 million to help developing countries shift to clean energy and transport as well as climate risk finance.”

The company is partly funded by the British government’s sovereign wealth investor, the Commonwealth Development Corporation, which invested close to US$300 million for a stake of just over 10 percent a few years ago.

Recently the US government’s own investment fund also announced plans to invest another US$300 million in the company.

Liquid Telecom, which was founded by Econet chairman Mr Strive Masiyiwa, focuses on developing digital infrastructure to support Internet and cloud computing. A total of 90 percent of its revenue comes from providing services to business enterprises, rather than directly to consumers.

The firm offers communications solutions across 13 countries primarily in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa that serves mobile operators, carriers, enterprise, media and content companies and retail customers with high-speed, reliable connectivity, hosting and co-location and digital services.

Liquid Telecom has built Africa’s largest independent fibre network, spanning more than 73 000 kilometres, and also operates state-of-the-art data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town (South Africa) and Nairobi (Kenya) with a combined potential 19 000 square metres of rack space and 78MW of power.

This is in addition to offering leading cloud-based services, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure, across our fibre footprint.