MTN Group – Africa’s biggest mobile operator – is leading an industry push to relax national telecoms rules, pitching shared networks as a fix for the continent’s $100 billion digital infrastructure deficit.

Senior Vice President Ebenezer Asante told Semafor the old telecom model, in which companies competed to build their own private networks, must be replaced by “shared ownership” of critical infrastructure if Africa is to capitalize on the next wave of financial technology and artificial intelligence.

The GSMA, the industry’s main lobby group, has reinforced the message, calling for “urgent, coordinated action” between governments, regulators and companies to treat telecoms as infrastructure and adopt a “shared responsibility.

For years, the continent’s telecom companies followed a simple playbook: buy the rights to broadcast a mobile signal, spend billions building a proprietary network of cables and towers, and guard that physical equipment from rivals. It is an expensive strategy that paid dividends during the voice boom. But as the continent moves from basic telecom services to complex data, cloud computing, and mobile financial services, that siloed infrastructure model is proving costly.

Estimates from the industry and the World Bank place Africa’s digital infrastructure funding gap at $100 billion. Even for giants like MTN —– which already pours $2 billion in capital expenditure into its networks annually —- the realization has set in that no single balance sheet is large enough to bridge the gap alone, while also funding next generation technologies like 5G rollouts and localized AI models.

“That layer of digital infrastructure is not one that requires competition. It’s one that requires shared ownership,” Asante said. “And that is a conversation we are having … even for the governments and regulators we’re engaging with, we’re telling them that the issue of risk should be a shared responsibility”.