Three certified data repositories among the 160 registered worldwide: this is where Africa stands in terms of scientific sovereignty. The continent generates data, trains researchers, publishes results, but the infrastructures that would make it possible to valorize, store, and share this data reliably remain almost entirely absent. This shortfall has a direct consequence: fragmentation of infrastructures can route data outside the continent and increase strategic vulnerability.
The Essentials
- Africa has 3 CoreTrustSeal-certified repositories out of a global total of 160 registrations, a sign of institutional lag that weighs on the credibility and reusability of African scientific data.
- African budgets devoted to data sovereignty remain insufficient relative to investment recommendations.
- The Nexus Core project in Morocco, in the development phase with an initial phase announced of 40 MW equipped with NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 GPUs, constitutes a remarkable initiative, but it is not enough to fill a structural deficit.
- National data management rules remain incompatible between African countries, which blocks cross-border pooling even when political will exists.
- The window for building a regional architecture of trust is open, but it will close as African startups, lacking local alternatives, shift toward North Atlantic clouds.
Three Certifications for a Continent of 54 Countries
CoreTrustSeal certification is a precise indicator. It attests that a data repository is reliable, sustainable, accessible, and managed according to auditable standards. For a researcher who wants to share their data or rely on that of a colleague, this certification is a basic guarantee. It also enables interoperability with major international scientific registries: without it, data exists but remains orphaned, difficult to integrate into global meta-analyses.
Of the 160 certified repositories registered worldwide, 3 are located in Africa. Europe has several dozen. The United States has around fifty. This contrast illustrates better than any long speech the gap between sovereigntist rhetoric and the reality of resources.
This deficit is not a statistical curiosity. It reflects a choice of allocation: African IT budgets devoted to data sovereignty remain limited. The money exists, and investments in connectivity, smartphones, and digital platforms are advancing across the continent. But building certified scientific data infrastructures, accessible and operated locally, receives limited budget attention in many governments.
African researchers produce data in epidemiology, climatology, agriculture, and genomics. In some fields, such as modeling tropical diseases or agricultural adaptation in the Sahel, African teams contribute to top-tier publications. This data is often stored on servers located outside the continent, managed by external institutions or companies. Asymmetries in data, platforms, and standardization can displace part of the value outside the continent, but their scope varies by sector and project.
Certification Is Missing, and National Regulations Compound This
The question of certification does not arise in a vacuum. It is situated within a fragmented regulatory landscape that makes any pooling at the continental scale difficult.
African countries have developed their own legal frameworks for data management, and these frameworks diverge. Some impose strict data localization on national soil. Others allow transfers but without mutual recognition mechanisms. Still others lack clear legislation. The African Union has established milestones with its Malabo Convention on cybersecurity, ratified by a minority of member states, and its policy framework for data governance adopted in 2022.
But between the adoption of a continental framework and its effective implementation in each country, there remains a gap that neither goodwill nor diplomatic summits can bridge alone.
The result is predictable: divergent rules may require coordination mechanisms for a shared cross-border repository. The Kenyan researcher must ensure that their data does not leave the territory according to national data protection law. The Senegalese researcher operates under a different regime. The host institution for the project, often European or American, then offers the simplest solution: place the data on its own servers, under its own terms of use. The sovereignty problem is solved, but at the expense of the African party.
This mechanism echoes what is observed in other contexts of scientific dependence. A previous article in the journal on Latin American research documented how dependence on foreign funding leads to surrendering one’s scientific agenda: data infrastructure plays the same role, more silently, but equally structuring. When data lives elsewhere, research questions end up following.
Morocco, Exception That Confirms the Rule
There is a counter-example. In 2026, the Nexus Core project was documented as being in the development phase, with an initial phase announced of 40 megawatts equipped with NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 chips. This is a remarkable project at the continental scale. It opens concrete possibilities: training large language models, processing massive scientific datasets, hosting sovereign cloud services.
The Nexus project is notable for several reasons. It signals that an African state can position itself as an infrastructure operator, not merely as a consumer. It attracts partnerships with universities and technology companies seeking a presence in the region. And it illustrates that a coherent national strategy, combining public investment, industrial partnerships, and geopolitical positioning, can produce tangible results.
This is a project located in Morocco but carried by an international consortium and oriented toward the EMEA market, rather than an exclusively Moroccan response. Morocco benefits from a specific geographic situation, institutional stability, trade relations with Europe, and access to international financing that is not equally available to the other 53 states on the continent. Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, which concentrate most of sub-Saharan Africa’s scientific and digital activity, do not have comparable equivalents. Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam, or Ouagadougou even less so.
The conditions that made Nexus possible—namely funding, regulatory framework, stability, and partnerships—depend on governance choices that exceed technology itself. Physical infrastructure is the visible product of a chain of institutional, financial, and political decisions that take years to build.
The Competition of Models Is Also Playing Out in Africa
The geopolitics of African scientific data infrastructure is not playing out in a strategic vacuum. Alice Ekman, analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, has developed a useful analytical framework: in global competition between great powers, what is at stake for third parties—states, regions, continents—is their capacity to build an autonomous model or their choice of which camp’s periphery to join.
Several major technology powers are investing on the African continent by offering cloud infrastructures, training programs, and university partnerships. Proprietary architectures and standards can create a risk of dependence, which portability and interoperability rules seek to reduce. An African university that stores its data on AWS or Alibaba Cloud integrates an ecosystem from which it becomes difficult to exit.
This reading nonetheless deserves nuance. The competition of models, as formulated by Ekman in her analysis of Sino-American rivalry, assumes actors with a coherent vision and capacity for long-term strategic action. Africa is a continent of 54 states with radically different interests, levels of development, and institutional histories. Speaking of an “African model” of data governance risks projecting a coherence that does not yet exist. The CoreTrustSeal certification data testify to this: with 3 certified repositories out of 160 global registrations, the continent has not yet built the critical institutional mass capable of weighing in this competition.
Daron Acemoglu’s work on the conditions for technological progress provides complementary, more institutionalist insight: a territory’s capacity to capture the gains from technological infrastructure depends first on the quality of its institutions, their ability to set clear rules, enforce them, and redistribute benefits. The African deficit in scientific data stems from insufficiently built, insufficiently interconnected, and often insufficiently funded institutional frameworks.
These two readings do not oppose each other. They complement each other: geopolitics creates urgency, institutionalism points to solutions. Credible African data governance requires robust institutions capable of weighing in this competition.
The 2026-2030 Window and What Must Be Built
Timing matters. The startups and laboratories constituting themselves in Africa today have not yet reached the stage where they need to raise large-scale foreign capital or integrate into global value chains requiring data standardization. In four to six years, this will be different. Fast-growing African companies risk aligning their data standards with those of their international partners, lacking established regional alternatives.
The United Nations University identifies this window as structuring in its work on African data sovereignty. The infrastructure choice made today conditions the dependencies of the following decade. This risk can be managed if appropriate projects are launched now.
Several elements would be necessary for an African architecture of trust to take shape. The first is mutual recognition of regulatory frameworks: its absence or insufficiency can complicate a shared repository between countries but does not necessarily make its construction impossible. The African Union has laid textual foundations; states must ratify and transpose them. The second is stepping up certifications: there must be a multiplication of data repositories capable of reaching CoreTrustSeal level, which requires training of technical teams, investment in management systems, and support from institutions that already possess this expertise.
The third element is financing. Current investments in sovereign data infrastructure remain limited. Filling this gap is not a matter for a single donor or single political decision. It requires African governments to arbitrate differently in their digital budget priorities, multilateral donors—World Bank, African Union, regional institutions—to condition their financing more on the construction of certified infrastructures, and public-private partnerships to include genuine, not symbolic, localization and capacity transfer clauses.
The scenario in which this window closes without having been used is easy to describe. African startups can raise funds from American or Chinese investors whose infrastructure requirements are compatible with their own standards. Data risks migrating toward North Atlantic or Asian clouds. African researchers regularly publish, but a significant share of their data transits through infrastructures located outside the continent. In ten years, an additional digital dependence has been added to existing dependencies.
The alternative scenario is less certain, but it has precedents. India built India Stack, its public digital infrastructure, starting from clear political will and an open architecture. The European Union began building common sectoral data spaces via the Gaia-X project, with the difficulties we know but also real progress. These models are not directly transposable, but they show that a collective actor can give itself the means for sovereign data infrastructure if it makes the choice to invest at the right time. What Gulf sovereign wealth funds do in biotech and quantum computing, as documented here, with a logic of strategic infrastructure capture, Africa could do with a logic of regional pooling.
The signals to watch in the coming years are precise: the ratification rate of the Malabo Convention and AU frameworks on data, the number of new African repositories applying for CoreTrustSeal certification, the evolution of the share of ICT budgets devoted to data governance, and the capacity of regional institutions like AUDA-NEPAD to propose a technically credible interoperability framework.
Initiatives Already Undertaken by Current Actors
To say that nothing is moving would be inaccurate. The Science for Africa Foundation finances programs strengthening scientific data management capacity in several sub-Saharan countries. Initiatives like the H3Africa network have shown that a genomic data infrastructure could be built with African teams in constrained contexts, provided dedicated funding and governance designed from the outset. The African Union has produced framework texts representing a real political anchor point, even if their implementation remains uneven.
Initiatives already exist; the challenge is moving toward a systemic architecture. CoreTrustSeal certifications require technical support, upskilling of data management teams, and often external audit. These steps are achievable, but they require time, institutional continuity, and resources. Data infrastructures function over time and not through two-year projects with ending funding, which makes the usual development aid cycles poorly suited to this type of issue.
The small number of African CoreTrustSeal repositories signals limited certification capacity, without directly measuring the weight of global platforms in scientific data. Governments, regional institutions, donors, and African scientific communities can change this state of affairs by treating data infrastructure as a condition of scientific sovereignty, just as universities, laboratories, or journals.
Sources
- Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Building Scientific Sovereignty: Data-Driven Strategies for Strengthening Research Capacity in LMICs: https://institute.global/insights/tech-and-digitalisation/building-scientific-sovereignty-data-driven-strategies-for-strengthening-research-capacity-in-lmics
- United Nations University, Africa’s Next Move and Why Data Sovereignty Is the Missing Key to the Continent’s Economic Future: https://unu.edu/article/africas-next-move-and-why-data-sovereignty-missing-key-continents-economic-future
- Alice Ekman, European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), geopolitical analyses and model competition: https://www.euiss.europa.eu/
- Science for Africa Foundation, programs strengthening African scientific capacity (scienceforafrica.org)
- Nature Communications, data on research infrastructures and certified repositories in sub-Saharan Africa
- CoreTrustSeal, registry of certified data repositories: https://www.coretrustseal.org/
- African Union, Policy Framework for Data Governance (2022) and Malabo Convention on Cybersecurity
