Cloudflare last week announced that is seeing a 4% to 7% increase in traffic month on month. As of July 2018, Cloudflare has 8 datacenters in Angola, Djibouti, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, and 3 in South Africa.
Africa has a population of 1.2 billion people over 58 countries, but the majority of Internet content providers are located in North America and Western Europe. According to Cloudflare when it comes to Africa, submarine cables will usually bring back the packets to Europe to hubs like Marseille, Paris, London, Lisbon and sometimes Frankfurt or Amsterdam, adding precious milliseconds, slowing down communications.
Cloudflare says that by setting up datacenters on the African continent, Cloudflare is able to serve content locally, increasing download speed in the region, improving the end-user experience, and ultimately increasing Internet usage.
Cloudflare plans to open 15 new datacenters in Africa. These include: Algeria (Algiers), Cameroon (Yaoundé), Congo (Kinshasa), Côte d’Ivoire (Abidjan), Egypt (Alexandria), Ghana (Accra), Kenya (Nairobi), La Réunion (Sainte-Marie), Madagascar (Antananarivo), Morocco (Casablanca), Nigeria (Lagos), Tanzania (Dar es Salaam), Tunisia (Tunis), Uganda (Kampala), and Zimbabwe (Harare).