Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline is set for a major digital infrastructure upgrade with the announcement of the LuLu Coastal Cable System, a new submarine cable project designed to strengthen connectivity along the country’s roughly 500-kilometre coastal corridor.
The project was unveiled at ITW Africa 2026, one of the region’s key telecom and digital infrastructure gatherings, and is being positioned as Kenya’s first fully protected coastal cable system — a distinction aimed at giving it greater resilience against the outages and physical damage that have periodically disrupted other undersea cables serving the region.
Coastal and submarine cables like this one form the backbone of internet and data connectivity for entire countries, carrying the bulk of international data traffic in and out of a region. As demand for bandwidth continues to climb — driven by everything from mobile data usage to the growth of data centres and cloud services — countries along Africa’s coastlines have been racing to add redundancy and capacity to their cable networks, reducing reliance on any single route or provider.
For Kenya specifically, a dedicated, fully protected coastal system could mean improved reliability for businesses, data centres, and everyday internet users along the corridor, while also reinforcing the country’s ambitions to position itself as a regional hub for digital infrastructure and connectivity in East Africa.
Further details on the project’s timeline, capacity, and the parties involved are expected to be released as development progresse