Zambia pushes local digital sovereignty

Lezeth Khoza
By Lezeth Khoza, Junior journalist
Johannesburg, 15 Oct 2025
Jacques de Vos, CEO of Mezzanine, and Percy Chinyama, SMART Zambia national coordinator.
Jacques de Vos, CEO of Mezzanine, and Percy Chinyama, SMART Zambia national coordinator.

Zambia's e-government arm, the SMART Zambia Institute, is working with Inq and Mezzanine to promote local digital sovereignty.

The collaboration, announced at the Digital Government Africa 2025 conference in Lusaka, is based on Mezzanine's Helium Platform and aims to deliver scalable, secure, and fully locally hosted digital infrastructure, as well as predictability and accountability through service-level agreement operations backed by local currency.

According to a press statement, the alliance brings together the Southern African country's own digital institutions with Mezzanine's experience in deploying platforms in constrained environments.

Over the next few months, the partners will deploy infrastructure and local hosting, migrate targeted government and enterprise workloads to Helium, launch pilot programmes across selected ministries and sectors, monitor, refine, and scale based on feedback and operational performance, and offer open collaboration for other African nations and institutions to adopt the model.

“Our role is to bring industrial-strength digital infrastructure into local ecosystems. The Helium Platform is built for that purpose. We look forward to delivering trusted, scalable services that grow with Zambia’s ambitions,” commented Jacques de Vos, CEO of Mezzanine.

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