Retirement fund the Mineworkers Provident Fund (MWPF) has committed $20-million, or about R305-million, to investment management firm Convergence Partners’ Digital Infrastructure Fund.
Convergence has backing from several international development finance institutions with the aim of accelerating the roll-out of digital infrastructure across Africa, to address the problems of availability, quality and cost of digital infrastructure.
The allocation from the MWPF will be used to fund several types of infrastructure to enable Africa’s active participation in the digital economy.
These include communication backbone infrastructure such as fifth-generation, cloud and edge processing infrastructure such as data centres, wireless access technologies, as well as continuing investments into broadband network infrastructure.
Convergence’s fund is said to build on a successful record of two previous funds which have seen both strong returns and high impact.