The project will land in the United Kingdom, France and Portugal at the European end, with destinations along the West African coast including the Canary Islands, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria, and extensions planned further south to improve connectivity diversity for countries along the route.
The founding consortium members are Canalink, GUILAB, International Mauritania Telecom, Orange Group, Orange Côte d’Ivoire, Sonatel and Silverlinks. The group said the project was structured as an open consortium, with additional partners invited to join.
The model gives co-investors direct participation in decisions covering the design, deployment and operation of the system, a structure the consortium described as designed to support the autonomy and digital sovereignty of participating nations.
The MoU initiates the project’s first phase, under which consortium members will jointly fund a cable route study to identify the optimal path balancing resilience, technical feasibility and economic efficiency. In parallel, the consortium is preparing a procurement process to select a cable supplier.
The cable is explicitly positioned as a diversity play. West Africa’s international connectivity has faced resilience challenges in recent years, with existing systems sharing routes that have proved vulnerable to simultaneous disruption. Via Africa is designed to provide a different subsea path from incumbent infrastructure, adding redundancy to a region where demand for international bandwidth is growing rapidly.
Orange is the anchor name in the consortium. The group is present in 18 countries across Africa and the Middle East, serving more than 175 million customers, and generated €8.4 billion in revenue from the region in 2025, making it Orange’s largest growth market.
Orange’s African subsidiaries, Orange Côte d’Ivoire and Sonatel, which operates across Senegal and several neighbouring markets are both listed as direct consortium participants, giving the project strong in-market distribution from the outset.
No build cost, cable length or target ready-for-service date has been disclosed at this stage, with both the route study and supplier selection still to be completed.
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