Helios Towers, the pan-African tower infrastructure company, and UNICEF have signed a multi-year partnership to expand internet connectivity and digital learning access for children and young people across Africa, starting with deployments in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi and Tanzania.

The deal ties the London-listed towerco, which operates in nine African markets plus Oman, to two of UNICEF's flagship digital inclusion initiatives. The first is Giga, the joint programme with the International Telecommunication Union that aims to connect every school in the world to the internet by 2030. The second is Learning Passport, UNICEF's platform delivering localised digital learning content and skills for children, young people and teachers, usable both online and offline.

The partnership pairs complementary capabilities. Helios Towers brings telecommunications infrastructure expertise and in-market engineering resources; UNICEF brings its digital inclusion programmes and education reach. Together they plan to advance school connectivity mapping and infrastructure development under Giga, while widening access to the Learning Passport platform in underserved communities.

Where it lands first

Three initial markets have been named: the DRC, Malawi and Tanzania. A fourth country in West Africa, not yet identified, is slated for additional support. All four sit squarely within Helios Towers' operating footprint, and the company says its established presence and engineering capability in these markets will help extend connectivity to communities where access remains limited.

The market selection matches Helios Towers' broader investment strategy, which targets underserved and high-growth markets — building connectivity infrastructure where the company judges need and potential impact to be greatest.

The demographic case

The partners frame the initiative against Africa's demographic reality: the continent holds the world's youngest and fastest-growing population. On their reasoning, expanding reliable school connectivity is critical if children and young people are to access education, develop digital skills and participate fully in future economies.

The Giga connection also gives the partnership a policy anchor. The UNICEF-ITU initiative, launched to close the school connectivity gap by 2030, has made school-level mapping a core tool for identifying where infrastructure investment delivers most value — work Helios Towers now proposes to support with its tower and network engineering assets.

Towercos and the connectivity gap

For Helios Towers, the agreement extends a commercial logic that infrastructure investors know well: towers in rural and peri-urban Africa often anchor connectivity that would otherwise be uneconomic to deploy. Supporting Giga's mapping and build-out puts the company's engineering capability to work in precisely the locations its investment strategy already favours.

UNICEF, for its part, gains a partner with physical infrastructure across nine African markets rather than a chequebook contribution alone — the towerco's field operations can translate connectivity targets into actual sites serving schools and surrounding communities.

Neither partner has disclosed financial terms, connectivity targets or a school-count figure for the initial three markets, so the partnership's measurable outcomes remain to be defined. What is firm is the timeframe of the wider initiative: Giga's 2030 deadline for universal school connectivity gives the collaboration a fixed horizon against which progress in the DRC, Malawi, Tanzania and the unnamed West African market can be tracked.