Approved project | PIDA PAP 2

Approved project

SADC Regional Carrier-Neutral Data Center

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Basic Information

Project Title	SADC Regional Carrier-Neutral Data Center
PIDA Sector	ICT
PIDA Sub-sector	Data Centers
Member States	Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe
Region	Southern Africa, Eastern Africa, Central Africa
Beneficiary Countries	Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe
Regional Economic Community	Southern Africa Development Community (SADC)
Project Institution	SADC Secretariat, SATA and hosting country

Strategic Alignment and Regional Commitment

Source in the National Master Plan	Linked to PIDA ICT Data Centers Programme
Source in the REC Master Plan	Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) and Regional Infrastructure Development Master Plan (RIDMP)
Brief Description of the Project	A data center is a critical information infrastructure. It complements IXPs to rely less on international transit for Internet. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet has shown to a be an absolute prerequisite of modern living and a tool that can be used to protect people, save lives, to enable people to telecommute, students to keep up with their studies and for everyone to keep in touch with their families and friends. Most online content, tools and services used were hosted outside the region and this placed a lot of strain on the costly International Internet links. A data center is the digital heart of each public or private network providing access to data and services via the Internet.
Objective and Rationale for the Project	To develop guidelines and establish a SADC Regional Carrier-Neutral Data Center to centralise the various critical and complementary core infrastructure elements that will reduce operational costs, further optimise the performance of Internet access to meet current and future demands of region and to ensure that the Internet access, tools and services are available and remain resilient against any regional or global crisis. The motivation of a regional data center is to reduce the cost of and stimulate hosting of content, create a cloud-based services ecosystem to accelerate e-services, and provide Government and the private sector with simple, flexible, scalable and secured solutions, with disaster recovery capability, in the region.
Location/Site	The optimal location to build the data center will be identified in the feasibility study. Location factors include proximity to power grids, ICT infrastructure, networking services, transportation lines and emergency services.
Existing or Planned Projects along the proposed project	The project serves an existing infrastructure asset of another sector, but there is less than 50% overlap in the geography serviced by the proposed project and the other sector existing asset.
Please provide more details for your choice above	The project also builds upon the various ICT infrastructure facilities such as the Internet Exchange Points (IXP), terrestrial connectivity infrastructure (cross-border interconnections/transit links). Services of a data center is cross-cutting. All sectors of the economy will benefit.
Technical Specifications of the Project	Tier 3 data center specifications
Market Size	Public and private entities within the SADC Region
Project Financial (in USD)	$10,000,000
Gender Procurement actions	Gender equality and equity in accordance with SADC Gender policy and guidelines.
Last Milestone Known	S0 - Enabling Environment and Needs Assessment

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