ITW Africa 2026 runs from 7 to 10 September at the Radisson Blu in Upper Hill, Nairobi, bringing carriers, data centre operators, fibre companies, hyperscalers and investors together for the continent’s main connectivity and digital infrastructure meeting. Registration is open on the event site.
The organiser, techoraco, expects more than 1,800 decision-makers from over 80 countries, and says 45% of attendees are C-suite, senior vice-presidents, vice-presidents or directors. The event is co-located with Datacloud Africa.
Six summits under one roof
The programme is organised into six summits, each covering a different layer of the African infrastructure market:
- Connecting Africa Fibre Summit
- Voice and Messaging Summit
- Mobile Access and Digital Services Summit
- InfraXchange Summit
- Digital Infrastructure Investment Day
- Digital Infrastructure Energy Summit
Regional Africa Workshops and a Startup and Skills Hub run alongside them. The spread is a reasonable map of where the money and the arguments currently sit: fibre routes, wholesale voice and messaging, mobile services, interconnection, financing and, increasingly, power.
Speakers and sponsors
Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, William Kabogo Gitau, is among the government speakers, alongside Ghana’s Deputy Minister for Communications, Mohammed Adams Sukparu. Executives from Google, Telkom Kenya and RAXIO Group are also on the programme.
Telkom Kenya and Cassava Technologies are host sponsors. Nokia, Telecom Egypt and RAXIO Group are gold sponsors.
Power and cooling move up the agenda
That a Digital Infrastructure Energy Summit now sits alongside the fibre and interconnection tracks says something about where African data centre planning has moved. Power availability, not connectivity, is the binding constraint in several of the continent’s largest markets.
Vertiv is exhibiting at stand 404, and Wojtek Piorko, its managing director for Africa, joins a panel titled “Designing Efficient and Sustainable Data Centres” on 8 September between 15:50 and 16:30.
“At ITW Africa this year, we’re showing how Vertiv continues to expand its end-to-end portfolio, combining high-density power solutions, liquid cooling, heat rejection, intelligent controls and lifecycle services, to help customers across Africa deploy AI-ready infrastructure faster and operate more efficiently over time,” said Piorko.
Liquid cooling is the detail worth watching. It is the standard answer to the rack densities that AI workloads demand, and it is not yet common in African facilities. How many operators in Nairobi are specifying it, rather than discussing it, is a fair measure of how far the continent’s AI infrastructure conversation has actually travelled.
The data centre half of the week
The co-located Datacloud Africa runs to its own schedule inside the same building, with a pre-event day on 7 September and the main programme from 8 to 10 September. It is the data centre and cloud half of the week, aimed at operators, hyperscalers, energy providers, investors and equipment vendors, and the organiser lists more than 160 speakers across both events.
The hyperscaler presence is the part worth noting. Alex Masu, who heads network investments for the Middle East and Africa at Meta, is on the programme, as are Lydia Carroon, director of strategic partnerships at Microsoft, and David Bunei, Oracle’s managing director for Kenya. Those are procurement and investment roles rather than evangelism ones, which is a reasonable signal of what the companies expect to do in the region rather than say about it.
On the public side, Nigeria’s National Information Technology Development Agency sends its director general, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, and the Communications Authority of Kenya sends Dennis Chepkwony, who runs its Universal Service Fund. Mugo Kibati, chief executive of Telkom Kenya, speaks for the host sponsor. The pairing of a universal service fund with a room full of hyperscaler investment leads is the more interesting conversation on the agenda: the two are usually held in separate buildings.
ITW Africa 2026
ITW Africa 2026 runs 7-10 September 2026 at the Radisson Blu, Upper Hill, Nairobi. The connectivity and digital infrastructure event gathers carriers, data centre operators, fibre companies, hyperscalers and investors across six summits, co-located with Datacloud Africa.
Event Type: Event
Event Attendance Mode: OfflineEventAttendanceMode
Event Status: EventScheduled
Performer: Organization
Performer Name: techoraco
Performer URL: https://www.internationaltelecomsweekafrica.com/
Start Date: 2026-09-14 04:27
End Date: 2026-09-14 04:27
Ticket URL: https://events.internationaltelecomsweek.com/RqewgR
Availability: InStock
Availability Starts: 2026-09-07
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