• Orange Sierra Leone opens €23m Bo data center as disaster-recovery site

• Facility expands rural connectivity and supports national digital resilience

• Operator now runs 616 sites and holds 51% of mobile market share
  

Orange Sierra Leone opened a data center in the southern city of Bo on Saturday. The facility, which cost 23 million euros (26.7 million dollars) to build, is an exact replica of the company’s main data center in the capital, Freetown.

It will serve as a disaster recovery site to ensure digital services remain operational during emergencies, outages or natural disasters.

“Located strategically in the south of the country, the new center helps expand digital infrastructure into rural and regional communities, particularly in the southern and eastern areas including Makeni, Kono and Kenema. It will enable better distribution of network traffic and improve connectivity in underserved areas,” the operator said in a statement on its Facebook page on Sunday.

The construction of this backup data center comes as Freetown remains exposed to landslide risks, such as the 2017 disaster, and as the country frequently faces flooding.

The launch is part of Sierra Leone’s broader digital transformation, where telecom services have become essential for businesses, households and government services. “The internet has become an indispensable tool in our daily lives. If the connection went down, everyone would see how dependent we have become on it,” said Salima Bah, Minister of Communications, Technology and Innovation, following a brief service interruption in August 2024. She added that the government and companies have made major investments to prevent such incidents from recurring.

In addition to this data center, Orange Sierra Leone operates 616 telecom sites across the country, 40 of which were recently deployed, and 70 percent of which are powered by renewable energy. The company has also invested 50 million dollars to modernize its entire network, which is now fully 4G and 5G compatible.

These efforts to improve service quality and network availability should give the operator a competitive advantage, according to the GSMA. The organization notes that “good service quality can improve the digital experience and create new opportunities for individuals and the wider community.” At the end of December 2024, Orange Sierra Leone reported 3.04 million mobile subscribers, representing a 51 percent market share in a market where it competes with Africell and QCell.

Isaac K. Kassouwi