Senegal and Gambia’s digital deal is really about cables and spectrum 🇸🇳 🇬🇲

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The digital partnership between Dakar and Banjul is moving past declarations and into hard network engineering problems. On a working visit to Banjul, Senegal’s Minister of Telecommunications and Digital Economy, Samba Diouf, met with his Gambian counterpart, Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Lamin Jabbi, along with technical teams from both countries, to discuss implementing the memorandum of understanding signed on June 12, 2026 in Dakar during the fourth Senegal-Gambia Presidential Council session.

Fréquences brouillées et roaming involontaire : le vrai chantier technique 📡

Connectivity, cybersecurity, technical skills development, and digital transformation: the four workstreams will progress according to their level of readiness rather than a single shared timeline — a method that suggests some files are considerably further along than others.

The groundwork had already been laid. In late June, regulators ARTP and PURA reportedly signed a protocol to coordinate radio frequencies, aiming to stop interference and limit unintentional roaming for populations living along the border. The two agencies also adjusted the free roaming arrangement that has been active since December 2025, which lets users from both countries make calls at local rates without swapping SIM cards when crossing the border — the exact terms of free incoming calls haven’t been publicly detailed.

Gambia’s Achilles’ heel: a single undersea cable for the whole country 🌊🔌

On international connectivity, Gambia remains structurally dependent on the ACE submarine cable, with terrestrial redundancy through Senegal still thin. The country’s own digital master plan flags this single point of failure as a direct constraint on the capacity and quality of available services. A stronger cross-border fiber network would give Banjul a backup route if the cable were ever disrupted.

A piece of Senegal’s New Deal Technologique 🚀

For Dakar, this work fits into the New Deal Technologique, the national strategy that makes universal connectivity, infrastructure interconnection, and cyber-resilience national priorities. By extending it to Gambia, Senegal is turning digital infrastructure into a tool for integrating two networks that are already tightly linked, electrically and economically.

Should Gambia prioritize connecting to Senegal’s fiber network over every other digital project? Let us know in the comments.