AIO (African Internet Observatory)

CONTACT

Email: theophilus [at] cmu [dot] edu

African Internet Observatory

Partners & Affiliations
ISOC
AFRINIC
CMU-Africa
ICANN

A single subsea cable cut can plunge millions of Africans into digital darkness. When fiber failed in West Africa, the outage cascaded far beyond internet access: national power companies could not process payments because their billing systems were hosted in Europe, businesses ground to a halt, and essential government services became unreachable. This fragility is not an accident — it is structural. The majority of content and services consumed in Africa are hosted externally, and traffic between neighboring African countries is often circuitous, boomeranging through Europe before returning to the continent. Every extra hop adds latency and jitter that degrade emerging services such as live streaming and federated learning, and every externally-hosted dependency is a single point of failure for critical infrastructure.

The African Internet Observatory (AIO) exists to close this evidence gap. AIO is a collective of projects that illuminates Africa's digital connectivity landscape through statistically rigorous measurement, representative and context-aware analysis, and simulation frameworks that let researchers and regulators investigate the impact of digital interventions before they are deployed. The goal is a continent where policy, investment, and engineering decisions rest on evidence generated in Africa, for Africa.

Progress To Date

40
Probes Deployed
2
Countries Live
30
Probes in Senegal
10
Probes in Rwanda

Tracking toward our 100×10 target (100 probes across 10 countries). Deployments in additional countries in progress — see Engage to host a probe.

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Goals & Deliverables

AIO's research agenda is organized around four measurable deliverables, each with defined outputs, timelines, and beneficiaries.

Goal #1 — Scale measurement infrastructure: 100 × 10
Deploy 100 probes across 10 African countries by end of 2027, more than doubling the measurement infrastructure on the continent outside South Africa. Currently at 40 probes across 2 countries (Senegal, Rwanda).
Output: open measurement dataset + probe atlas Timeline: 2025 – 2027 Beneficiaries: researchers, operators
Goal #2 — Assess cyber resilience of critical services
Produce annual resilience assessments of government services and utilities (payments, identity, power billing, health records) across participating countries, quantifying external-dependency risk and publishing actionable reports to regulators.
Output: annual resilience report + regulator briefings Timeline: yearly starting 2026 Beneficiaries: regulators, ministries, citizens
Goal #3 — Benchmark readiness for emerging applications
Characterize whether existing African infrastructure can support real-time learning, federated learning, and live streaming at acceptable quality. Deliver a public benchmark suite and peer-reviewed analysis identifying bottlenecks and investment priorities.
Output: open benchmark suite + peer-reviewed publications Timeline: initial release 2026, annual updates Beneficiaries: AI/ML community, application developers
Goal #4 — Quantify end-user reliability, consistency, and privacy
Measure and characterize reliability, performance consistency, and privacy exposure for end users at the household and mobile level, producing country-level indicators comparable year over year.
Output: country-level indicator dashboard Timeline: first release 2026 Beneficiaries: civil society, policymakers, consumers

Engage with us: We are actively recruiting stakeholders.

  • Network providers (IXP, ISP, MNO): We seek to develop more meaningful interfaces for IXP-Manager to understand and debug peering interactions and their implications. We also seek to characterize your networks. Please express your interest here.
  • Volunteers: We are looking for volunteers to host our probes and participate in our study.
  • Researchers: We would like to shed light on the characteristics of African networks and connectivity. Please share your research artifacts with us via this form.

Partner / Fund Us

AIO is a public-good measurement infrastructure. Every contribution directly expands coverage across Africa and deepens the evidence base available to researchers, regulators, and network operators. We welcome partnerships with foundations, agencies, industry, and individual donors.

Sponsor a probe
Fund a single measurement endpoint — hardware, local data plan, and storage for one probe in an underrepresented country.
Sponsor a server node
Fund compute, storage, and bandwidth for the aggregation and analysis infrastructure that supports the probe network.
Sponsor a country deployment
Underwrite a full probe rollout in a new country, including local partnerships, volunteer coordination, and a year of operating costs.

To discuss partnership, sponsorship, or in-kind support, please contact theophilus [at] cmu [dot] edu.

Active projects

  • Analysis of subsea cable outage impact (direct, indirect, and economic impact).
  • Quantification and analysis of locality in Africa (content, routing, and infrastructure).
  • Community network designs in Africa ( presentation at the BIAS Workshop).
  • Characterization of infrastructure capabilities in Africa (terrestrial, subsea, LEO).