West Africa Telecommunications Regulators Assembly (WATRA) has said investments in the digital economy add $30 billion to the region’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) yearly.
  
The Guardian checks show that West Africa had 418.5 million population in 2021, with GDP as of 2023 put at $810 billion. According to WATRA, the region, which telecommunications sector it superintends, remains buoyant and has deepened the regional digital economy.
  
The Executive Secretary of the body, Aliyu Aboki, who disclosed this at the weekend during a virtual meeting with stakeholders, said WATRA was working to ensure more access to the people, adding that he was working on initiatives to facilitate infrastructure sharing among West African countries to lower the cost of internet for telecoms subscribers across the region.
 
Infrastructures such as gateways and data centres, according to him, are facilities that could be shared by countries in the region.
 Admitting that the cost of Internet across West African countries had remained high, Aboki said a lower cost of Internet access would enhance the digital economy for the respective countries in the region and increase the consumption of data by the citizens, which, in turn, would generate more revenue for the telecom operators.
   
“We are exploring regional initiatives to share infrastructure and reduce cost. For example, we have infrastructures like gateways, data centre servers, and so on. These are infrastructures that can be shared and used by different countries without necessarily having everyone building the same infrastructure. 
  
“So, we are collectively looking at these rich regional initiatives that will enable us to share infrastructure to bring down the cost of Internet ultimately,” Aboki stated.  
  
Identifying the lack of interconnectivity as another factor driving up the cost of telecoms services in the sub-region, the WATRA executive secretary lamented that for content hosted in one African country to be accessed in another African country, it would have to go through Europe. 
  
According to him, the Europe connection exists because data centres in the region are not connected directly, a factor making internet access costlier for the users. 
  
While noting that one of the critical programmes of WATRA was to encourage interconnectivity of respective countries, Aboki said: “We have data centres springing up in different countries, but to interconnect to these data centres, we need to go through submarine cables to Europe and the Western countries and back to Africa, just to interconnect. 
  
“This creates additional cost. Now, once we can interconnect within our regions across boundaries, we will certainly drive down costs.”
 WATRA was established in 2002 as a result of the need for a common platform for the telecommunications and ICT regulators in the West African region to exchange information, share best practices, and coordinate their actions.

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