South Africa’s year as G20 President is more than diplomatic theatre. It is a chance to recast our country as a place that can design and build the digital systems a modern economy needs to grow and thrive. At the centre of our ambition sits an idea moving rapidly up the global agenda: digital public infrastructure (DPI).
Across the G20 and its business arm, the B20, DPI and responsible AI are being framed as enablers of inclusive growth, jobs and SME development. The B20’s Digital Transformation work warns that the digital divide will widen unless countries build interoperable, people-centred DPI that reaches those long excluded from formal systems. For Telkom, the challenge is to build the digital backbone of South Africa that enables DPI.
Telkom is rising to that challenge making the argument that connectivity is now core economic infrastructure, and South Africa’s competitiveness depends on treating it as such.
What digital public infrastructure really means
DPI can sound abstract, but its building blocks are familiar. It is the shared digital “plumbing” of digital identity, payment rails, data-exchange platforms and the high-capacity networks that connect them that allows citizens, the state and business to interact securely at scale. Just as roads and power lines underpinned industrial economies, these digital systems now carry services, information and commerce.
When those systems are patchy, expensive or unreliable, the impact is immediate: a clinic cannot access patient records; a spaza shop owner cannot receive low-cost digital payments; a student in a rural town struggles to download coursework. When they work, they fade into the background and quietly empower what is possible in a country.
A backbone built for inclusion
Telkom operates one of Africa’s most extensive open-access fibre networks consisting of more than 180 000 kilometres of fibre, underpinned by mobile coverage that reaches the majority of South Africans. It has set a goal of lifting national connectivity so that more than half of the population can use high-speed broadband, with a deliberate focus on township and rural communities, not only premium urban markets.
That strategy assumes that South Africa’s next wave of growth lies in bringing millions of new users and enterprises online. Telkom’s DPI message at the B20 is less about eye-catching apps and more about the resilient infrastructure those apps depend on: dense fibre backbones, modernised mobile networks, secure data centres and cloud platforms delivered through Telkom infrastructure, and payment rails that lower the cost of digital participation for small firms and informal traders.
Because DPI is ultimately a public-private project, how business shows up at the G20 and B20 matters. Telkom’s role has included not only sponsorship, but participation in policy discussions on digital transformation and infrastructure resilience, and support for platforms that recognise SMMEs within the G20 Digital Economy Working Group and related ministerial events. Those choices signal a shift from seeing connectivity purely as a consumer product to understanding it as a shared national asset.
DPI reduces friction at every step of the value chain. It shortens queues to register a business, simplifies KYC checks when opening bank accounts, cuts the cost of cross-border payments under the AfCFTA, and makes it easier to plug township suppliers into formal procurement systems. When a start-up can access real-time data, cloud services and digital finance tools over reliable networks, the abstract language of “digital infrastructure” becomes a concrete growth story.
A strategic asset, not a slogan
South Africa’s G20 Presidency has leaned into Africa’s realities: youthful populations, rising urbanisation, deep inequality and uneven connectivity. DPI sits at the intersection of all four. It is the platform on which e-health, e-learning, smart agriculture, digital justice and modernised public services can scale across the continent. Built badly, it risks entrenching old divides and inequalities in new code.
Telkom’s contribution has been to keep the conversation anchored in basics: coverage, affordability, reliability and security. It has argued that we cannot talk credibly about trusted digital ID or AI-enabled public services if the underlying networks are fragile or out of reach for most citizens. By opening its infrastructure on an open-access basis, investing in cybersecurity and data governance, and partnering with the state and other operators, it is nudging the ecosystem towards shared standards that make DPI interoperable rather than fragmented.
There is commercial logic in all this. A country with robust digital public infrastructure is a better place to do business, for Telkom and its competitors alike. But there is also a deeper strategic thread that speaks to South Africa’s long-term interests. In a world where value increasingly flows through data-rich, platform-based systems, countries that own and shape their digital infrastructure will have greater policy space, stronger local industries and more resilient societies.
Seen in that light, Telkom’s role at the G20 and B20 is about signalling the intent that South Africa plans to help design, own and operate the digital infrastructure of its next growth chapter. If policy, investment and infrastructure are aligned around DPI as a strategic national asset, the result will not be a slogan, but a quiet revolution in an economy where many more South Africans, and many more African enterprises, can step confidently onto the digital stage.
