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It’ll Be Months Before We Know the First B3W Projects, But the Battle Between the U.S. and China Over African Mobile Telecoms is Already Underway

by Eric Olander

U.S. officials have not let on which projects they will support as part of the new B3W plan, their latest effort to blunt China’s infrastructure dominance in the Global South and the Belt and Road Initiative more broadly, however, it’s almost certain that mobile telecommunications will be part of the mix. 

In Africa, the battle is already underway as the U.S.-backed Africell attempts to challenge Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications providers head-on in building network infrastructure and cloud data centers. To be sure, it’s not an equal comparison given that Africell, unlike Huawei, has commercial operating licenses in four African countries. 

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