A submarine cable, which is expected to enhance West Africa’s connectivity to Europe and other parts of the world, landed in Ghana on Wednesday.
The Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), financiers of Main One Submarine Cable, said in a statement that it had completed the first phase of the 7,000-kilometre Main One submarine fibre optic cable system, which links Portugal, Ghana and Nigeria, with branching units in the Canary Islands, Morocco, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire.
The second phase of the project would extend connectivity to South Africa.
The statement said the Main One cable system would deliver 1.92Tbps of high capacity bandwidth, equivalent to 10 times the available capacity of the existing fibre optic cable serving West Africa and more than 20 times the satellite capacity currently available across sub-Saharan Africa.
AFC President and Chief Executive, Mr. Andrew Alli, said: “As a pan-African financing institution, AFC is proud to be a partner in the Main One Submarine Cable project, an African-conceived and driven project, which will open and integrate the continent’s ICT markets and address the commercial imperative necessary to drive economic growth.”
The Chief Executive Officer of Main One Cable Company Limited, Ms Funke Opeke, said the AFC brought a combination of technical, institutional, regional and financial skills into the project, which would provide the much needed telecommunications capacity in West Africa.
“The participation of AFC enhanced the ability of the project to complete the necessary financing for its implementation,” she said.
The AFC is an African-led financial institution with the mission to improve African economies by developing and financing infrastructure and industrial and financial assets.
