Jacqueline Ntaka [email protected]
IT sounds like a contradiction: how can a country with no coastline import something as weightless as data? Yet Zimbabwe, like Zambia, Botswana and Malawi, effectively does exactly that every time someone opens a webpage, streams a video or sends a WhatsApp message.
Despite all the talk of “the cloud” and satellites, the vast majority of international internet traffic travels through submarine cables. These fibre-optic networks lie on the ocean floor, linking continents and connecting to coastal landing stations where data enters and leaves national networks. Because Zimbabwe is landlocked, it has no direct access to these undersea cables and no landing stations of its own.
Instead, the country reaches the global internet through its neighbours. Fibre networks crossing national borders connect Zimbabwe to coastal gateways in countries such as Mozambique and South Africa, where undersea cables come ashore. Local operators pay for international bandwidth, effectively purchasing the right to carry traffic across other countries’ infrastructure before it reaches the wider world. In that sense, Zimbabwe is importing connectivity.
Most online content cannot simply be kept within the country’s borders because the services people use every day are hosted elsewhere. Search engines, social media platforms, cloud services and streaming providers all rely on servers located in places such as Europe, North America and South Africa. Whenever a user loads a webpage or watches a video, data must travel out of Zimbabwe to retrieve the content and then return along the same route. Every journey consumes international bandwidth, which must ultimately be paid for, often in foreign currency.
Being landlocked therefore carries a digital cost. Internet traffic must pass through at least one neighbouring country’s network, meaning multiple operators take a share of the revenue. Longer distances can increase latency, causing slower response times, while dependence on external infrastructure leaves connectivity vulnerable to cable cuts, flooding, power failures or policy disputes beyond Zimbabwe’s borders.
With fewer routes available, operators also have less leverage when negotiating prices.
To reduce these costs, countries increasingly focus on keeping more traffic local. Internet exchange points allow domestic networks to exchange data directly, ensuring that communications between Zimbabwean users remain within the country rather than taking an unnecessary detour abroad. Local data centres and content caching provide another solution by storing frequently accessed material closer to users. When popular videos, software updates or web content are available locally, repeated requests no longer need to travel across international links.
At the same time, resilience is improved by expanding the number of available routes. Connections through multiple neighbouring countries, including Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia, provide alternatives if one pathway experiences disruptions. Satellite services can also serve as a backup, although they generally remain more expensive than fibre-based connections.
The reality is that data may be weightless, but it still requires physical infrastructure. For a landlocked nation, that infrastructure inevitably passes through someone else’s territory, and the cost of access is real.
Understanding this helps explain why internet prices vary so widely between countries and why investments in local data centres, internet exchange points and regional fibre networks are so important. They are not simply technological upgrades; they are ways of reducing dependence on external routes and keeping more of the internet closer to home.
Jacqueline Ntaka is the CEO of Mviyo Technologies, a local tech company that provides custom software development, mobile applications and data analytics solutions. She can be contacted on [email protected]
