Tahiry Rakotoheriniaina put the trust problem plainly at a panel in Yaoundé this October. Simply moving government services online, the International Telecommunication Union’s Regional Representative for Central Africa and Madagascar argued, is not enough. People will only abandon traditional offices if they have confidence in digital platforms, algorithms, and the way their data is handled.
That question, what it would take for ordinary Africans to actually use the digital services their governments keep promising, sat at the center of the eGov’A 2026 summit, held October 14 to 17 in Cameroon’s capital. Officials, entrepreneurs and civil society delegates concluded that the answer lies in systems that talk to each other, and in data that stays close to home.
Their conclusion was formalized in the Yaoundé Declaration, an 11-page document adopted at the summit. It frames digital public infrastructure, or DPI, as a foundational pillar for transforming public administrations across the continent, calling it a strategic asset for national sovereignty, citizen inclusion, and continental integration.
The gathering drew government representatives, development institutions, civil society and technology companies from across Africa and beyond. Discussions ranged over DPI, artificial intelligence in public services and digital sovereignty, while a hackathon gave young innovators a stage to showcase their solutions.
On the substance, the declaration urges African governments to intensify efforts to build DPI on three core components: digital identity, digital payments, and secure data-exchange platforms. These should be complemented by electronic signatures and authentication systems, notification systems, cloud and computing infrastructure, and integrated public-service portals.
Interoperability received particular emphasis. Governments, the document states, must make their public infrastructure systems interoperable so that public entities can communicate through open standards, secure interfaces, and shared reference systems to ease service delivery. It also endorses the “Once Only” principle, under which information an administration already legally holds should not be requested again from the same citizen. Digital ID experts have made a similar point before, arguing that interoperability from day one is a necessity for digital ID systems.
Digital sovereignty featured prominently too. The summit called for accelerated public and private investment in connectivity and sovereign infrastructure, including data centers, government cloud solutions, high-performance computing, Internet exchange points, high-speed networks, and disaster-recovery systems. It advocated a “Local First, African First” approach that prioritizes domestic hosting of government data, with a fallback: where national capacity is insufficient, hosting elsewhere in Africa should be preferred over locations outside the continent, provided appropriate safeguards exist.
The declaration sets a deadline of sorts. Critical or sovereign public data should be hosted domestically by 2030, alongside greater investment in connectivity, computing capacity and cross-border digital services.
Meanwhile, participants stressed aligning national DPI strategies with existing continental and international frameworks: the African Union’s digital transformation strategy, the African Continental Free Trade Area Protocol on Digital Trade, the UN Global Digital Compact, and the Smart Africa framework. They called for accelerated efforts to enable cross-border recognition and interoperability of digital identity, electronic signatures, digital certificates, e-invoices, and payment mechanisms across African borders.
Some of this is already moving from ambition to practice. A recent Smart Africa pilot involving Benin, Ghana, and Rwanda is progressing toward cross-border digital ID verification.
To keep momentum going, the declaration established the African Observatory on E-Government and AI as a permanent mechanism tasked with monitoring digital transformation, measuring progress, documenting good practices, and supporting learning between African administrations.
The summit reflects a broader shift across the continent toward shared DPI rather than isolated digital services. The argument made there was straightforward: interoperability lets public institutions exchange information securely and cut repetitive administrative processes, while local infrastructure and data centers strengthen sovereignty and control over critical public data. Cameroon, for its part, has been weighing these priorities for some time, including through a push for interoperable digital government at the Cameroon Internet Governance Forum held in August. Whether the 2030 hosting deadline turns ambition into practice across the continent is the question that will now be watched from Yaoundé and beyond.