General profile Digital profile

Gambia

Digital Snapshot – Key Policies and Laws

The Gambia’s digital profile is shaped by a whole-of-government planning stack rather than one ‘single’ ICT law or strategy: the Digital Economy Master Plan (2024–2034) sets a decade-long programme across infrastructure, public-sector transformation, skills, and innovation. Connectivity remains uneven, but baseline indicators show a small, fast-digitising market. Many sector strategies are discoverable through the government’s policy repository listings for the communications/digital ministry.

For core digital infrastructure, international connectivity relies heavily on the ACE submarine cable, with landings in Banjul. The landing is operated locally by Gambia Submarine Cable (GSC), which publicly states it has operated the ACE landing since 2012. This creates resilience sensitivities: the Internet Society’s resilience analysis highlights the risks of concentrated international paths and scores the Gambia at ~43% overall resilience in its index. The country also established a local exchange point, SIXP, to keep domestic traffic local and improve performance/costs.

ACE cable dependence and digital resilience

On 4 January 2022, The Gambia experienced a country-wide internet blackout lasting more than eight hours, cutting off connectivity for nearly the entire population and immediately affecting daily communications, business activity, and public services. The incident was not described as a government-ordered shutdown; instead, reporting and technical analysis linked it to failures in international connectivity and backup routing, underscoring the country’s heavy reliance on a limited number of external routes. Analyses highlighted that when traffic was rerouted during ACE cable repair conditions, backup gateways (including those connected via Senegal) did not perform as intended, turning a technical fault into a national disruption. For many Gambians, who primarily access the internet via mobile devices, this kind of outage is more than an inconvenience: it can interrupt remittances, learning, health coordination, and small-business sales that rely on messaging and mobile payments. The event became a widely cited example in resilience discussions, reinforcing policy debates about redundancy, diversified international links, stronger contingency planning, and transparent incident communication.

For broadband and next-generation connectivity, the Government has published a Broadband Strategic Plan (2020–2024) and newer Broadband Strategy documents, signalling ongoing focus on access, affordability, and backbone/last-mile build-out. 5G is discussed through regulatory and sector developments, including reporting that PURA endorsed a 5G deployment by an operator after standards checks. In practice, 5G progress will likely track spectrum and market-readiness decisions rather than a standalone strategy document.

On cybersecurity and digital trust, The Gambia has both a National Cybersecurity Strategy and Action Plan (2022–2026) and a National Cybersecurity Policy (2022–2026), which frame governance, capacity-building, and cooperation priorities.

For data governance and data protection, the policy backbone includes a Data Protection and Privacy Policy and Strategy (2019) and a newer legislative step: legal analysis reports that the President assented to the Personal Data Protection and Privacy Act on 7 November 2025, described as the country’s first comprehensive data protection law. In parallel, the state is advancing ‘data as infrastructure’ through a Government Open Data Strategy (2024–2027), which explicitly links to broader digital transformation planning and privacy/security principles.

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In digital government, cloud, e-commerce, and AI, implementation is increasingly anchored in concrete blueprints: the Digital Government Policy and Roadmap and draft G-Cloud policy indicate a move toward shared platforms and government cloud adoption. The Country Commercial Guide still characterises e-commerce as an early-stage market.

The most ‘advanced’ emerging-tech platform visible in public sources is payments interoperability: BANTABA 2.0 launched in December 2025 as a national real-time interoperable payments platform spanning banks and mobile money, which matters for e-commerce and GovTech payments. AI activity is currently more capacity-building and policy-adjacent, e.g. Commonwealth-supported AI training at UTG and national policy dialogue on framing AI for development.

Gambia’s permanent mission to the UN:

The Permanent Mission of the Republic of The Gambia to the UN Office and other international organisations in Geneva represents The Gambia across the UN system and supports The Gambia’s engagement on areas such as human rights, humanitarian issues, trade and multilateral diplomacy. UNOG lists the Mission’s official contact details and head of mission (including the Permanent Representative), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ “missions abroad” page includes Geneva among The Gambia’s permanent missions.

Official UN website: https://www.ungeneva.org/en/blue-book/missions/member-states/gambia