From Blackouts to Breakthroughs

In Cameroon, electricity shortages are a daily reality – power cuts come suddenly and often. Statistically, the country suffers roughly ten power outages each month, each lasting around two hours on average. These blackouts spare no one. From big cities to rural towns, they grind business to a halt, leave hospitals scrambling for backup power, and force students to study by candlelight. The economic toll is brutal: by one estimate, chronic power failures cost Cameroon about 5% of its GDP. In one infamous incident, some 2,500 shipping containers piled up at Douala’s port during a weeks-long outage, racking up fees and losses.

Yet amid these literal dark times, Cameroon’s tech community has refused to dim. We have adapted. Any startup founder here quickly learns the art of contingency. Unsteady grid? Get a generator or a solar backup as lifelines. Many offices and hubs keep fuelled generators at the ready; the rumble of gensets often underscores our coding sessions. Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are essentials, not luxuries – they give us those precious extra minutes to save work when the lights flicker out. In our emerging tech hubs, you’ll even find solar panels sprouting on rooftops, a DIY answer to an unreliable grid. When the government couldn’t keep the lights on, we learned to do it ourselves.

These struggles, ironically, have a way of sparking creativity. I’ve seen young engineers turn car batteries into improvised power banks for their routers and build apps that work offline by design – a practical necessity when you can’t count on connectivity. The lack of steady power means solutions must be energy-efficient and resilient by nature. For example, some local developers optimise their code and hardware to handle abrupt shutdowns or run on minimal electricity. Each outage is an annoyance, but it’s also a training ground in tenacity. No power? No problem. Cameroonian techies will find a way to keep the project alive – even if it means coding through the night when the electricity finally returns.

“Internet Refugees” in the Silicon Mountain

Electricity is one battle; internet access is another. Cameroon’s internet connectivity is notoriously slow and expensive, even on a good day. Fewer than half of Cameroonians use the internet (about 44% penetration as of 2024), and those who do endure sluggish speeds – a median of ~10 Mbps on fixed broadband, ranking among the world’s slowest. For a tech entrepreneur trying to push code or a student watching an online lecture, it’s a test of patience. Downloading a large software update can take hours. Mobile data isn’t cheap either relative to incomes, making heavy online work a privilege. This harsh reality forces us to be frugal with bandwidth. We schedule big downloads overnight when networks are less congested, and we cache educational videos for offline use. A common scene at our tech hubs: one person will download resources and then share them locally, so others don’t all need to burn through their own data. In short, we’ve learned to stretch every megabyte and innovate with minimal bandwidth.

If everyday internet in Cameroon is bad, at times it has been nonexistent – by government decree. Between 2017 and 2018, in the grip of a political crisis, the Cameroonian government shut down internet access in the two Anglophone regions for a combined 230 days. This was longest internet blackout ever recorded in Africa. I was living in Buea, home to our “Silicon Mountain” tech community, when the first blackout hit. On January 17, 2017, without warning, our internet went dead. An entire region of millions of people was cut off – no emails, no web, not even mobile data. The government had flipped a switch, ostensibly to quell Anglophone protests and “fake news,” but in doing so it silenced our budding tech ecosystem at its most critical hub. 

That first shutdown lasted 93 days (Jan–Apr 2017). It was total and devastating. “It felt like going back to the Stone Age,” one entrepreneur in Buea remarked at the time. Companies couldn’t reach clients, students couldn’t do online research, and digital payments ground to a halt. Local startups lost contracts and money; some had to fire employees. As a young software engineer, I suddenly found myself an “internet refugee.” Along with dozens of others, I had to travel two hours by bus to Cameroon’s largest city, Douala, just to find a connection. We’d crowd into any café or friend’s apartment with internet, frantically downloading emails, files, anything we might need, then trek back to Buea to work offline. It was a surreal commute: by night in Buea we wrote code with no real-time web access; by day we became digital nomads in Douala, ferrying data back and forth like couriers.

Our community improvised rapidly. Tech hub spaces in the francophone zones, like ActivSpaces in Douala, opened their doors to those of us from Buea who were stranded by the shutdown. Small “internet camps” sprouted up along the boundary of the blackout region, where one could catch a stray signal from a bordering network. I remember we jokingly called one spot “Silicon Border” – it was essentially an empty roadside where, if you stood on the right hill, your phone might latch onto a cell tower from Littoral region (where internet was still on). Dozens of us would gather there, phones held up to the sky, hoping for a bar of signal. It was both absurd and inspiring: in the face of a digital siege, we turned a highway rest stop into a makeshift office.

By the time the second shutdown came in late 2017, targeting social media apps for another four months, we were more prepared. Many had installed VPNs to circumvent blocks (though not everyone could afford these tools). Some entrepreneurs simply relocated – temporarily shifting their base to Yaoundé or abroad to keep their startups alive. The toll was heavy. Tech CEO Churchill Nanje noted that the shutdown “pushed out a lot of the talent” from Silicon Mountain – brain drain fueled by disconnection. Indeed, a few promising startups and developers left Cameroon for good during that period, unwilling to risk being cut off again.

Still, many of us stayed and resisted in our own ways. The #BringBackOurInternet campaign went global. Cameroonian tech leaders like Rebecca Enonchong rallied worldwide support on Twitter, pressuring the government to restore access. International voices – from the UN to internet freedom groups – joined the chorus. Even the Pope was reported to have quietly urged President Biya to turn the net back on. At home, we documented every loss caused by the blackout: millions in economic damage, jobs vanished, students missing scholarship deadlines because they couldn’t get online. Perhaps most emblematic was the story of Nji Collins Gbah, a 17-year-old from the Northwest region who, against all odds, won Google’s international coding competition in 2017 – all while his town had no internet. To submit his final project, he had to literally move to a new city with internet. His triumph amid the blackout showed the world how much potential was being suffocated.

The internet eventually came back on. The government restored connectivity following mounting pressure. The minister’s statement, however, carried an ominous warning that they “reserve the right” to cut it again if citizens “misused” the internet. And indeed, they did cut access again that October. Not until March 2018 was the region fully reconnected, ending a total 230-day digital darkness. We collectively exhaled – and immediately got back to work rebuilding what we’d lost.

Adaptation: Adversity as the Mother of Innovation

Living through those blackouts – both electricity and internet – has left an indelible mark on Cameroon’s tech community. We emerged from each challenge a bit scarred but a lot stronger. The hardships have forged perhaps the most resourceful innovators in Africa.

Consider how we design technology. Knowing that any service might have to run offline, on low power, or on patchy networks, Cameroonian developers inherently build with fault tolerance in mind. A local fintech startup, for instance, created a banking app that can process transactions offline and sync later – a feature born directly from the internet shutdown experience. During the blackout, one microfinance client could only operate within one branch because branches couldn’t talk to each other without the internet, spurring the developers to make their system more robust. That innovation gives their product an edge even in stable markets, because it works anywhere, anytime. Constraint breeds creativity. We don’t curse our constraints (well, we do, but then we code around them).

The resilience isn’t only technical – it’s personal and communal. I’ve watched students who lost months of online access double down on learning from whatever offline materials they had, refusing to fall behind. In the absence of YouTube tutorials, people created peer-to-peer training sessions in person. Communities formed study groups and coding clubs that could operate without internet, sharing PDFs and textbooks hand-to-hand. Even now, with normal connectivity back, that habit of mutual support remains. We keep local copies of important resources and openly share knowledge, knowing how precious it is when you can’t just Google something.

Our startups have also become adept at contingency planning. Disaster recovery is not an afterthought – it’s step zero. Many companies now maintain backup communication channels (like SMS hotlines or radio bulletins) to reach users during internet outages. When mobile money services fail (not uncommon during network downtimes), businesses pivot to cash or offline vouchers. One e-commerce venture I know pre-prints catalogs and order forms, ready to switch to phone orders if needed. It sounds archaic, but it kept them afloat during a week-long ISP breakdown last year. We’ve essentially hacked our way to a form of hybrid digital-analog existence, ensuring that no single point of failure – be it a power grid or a fibre optic cable – can completely paralyse operations.

Crucially, these tough experiences have united us. The Silicon Mountain community in particular turned pain into solidarity. During the crises, techies, civil society, and even non-tech residents bonded together to support one another. When the government tried to muzzle us, it inadvertently politicised us – young entrepreneurs who previously “didn’t do politics” found themselves campaigning for digital rights. We all learned that access to the internet is not a luxury but a basic right, as vital for our work as electricity and water. That ethos now drives many to speak out against any form of censorship or infrastructural neglect. The result: a generation of Cameroonian tech leaders who are both innovative and civically engaged, determined to hold authorities accountable for the infrastructure we need.

Triumphs in the Face of Turmoil

It would be easy to paint a hopeless picture, but the opposite is true – Cameroon’s tech sector is turning the corner, fueled by our hard-won resilience. In the very same Anglophone region that was blacked out, a tech renaissance is underway. By 2023, Buea’s annual Silicon Mountain Conference was drawing more than 3,000 participants – young developers, startup founders, students, investors – all gathering to celebrate innovation and hash out solutions to our common challenges. The sight of thousands of bright minds converging at the foot of Mount Cameroon, just a few years after that area had been effectively silenced, is powerful. It tells me that the spirit was never broken.

Concrete successes are emerging. Cameroonian startups are now earning recognition across Africa and globally. Waspito, a health-tech platform born in Cameroon, won the Africa Tech Award in its category in 2023, beating competitors from across the continent. Another fintech venture, Diool, raised millions from international investors to scale its payment solutions – and its founders often cite the crucible of operating in Cameroon as key to their robust model. We also take pride in home-grown innovations like Himore Medical’s CardioPad – a tablet for remote heart diagnostics – invented by a young Cameroonian engineer to solve rural healthcare gaps. Such inventions speak to how our difficulties drive us to solve problems that matter. If you can invent tech that works in Cameroon, it can work anywhere.

Even the government, which once saw the internet as a threat, is starting to come around. In recent years, authorities talk a lot more about making Cameroon a “digital economy.” They’ve set up innovation competitions, offering grants to startups in sectors like agritech and fintech. There’s even a draft Startup Act in the works to provide tax breaks and support for new tech companies. Many in our community remain sceptical – memories of past repression run deep – but these steps show that our message got through: you can’t shut off progress forever. The fact that officials are now courting tech hubs for input, rather than shutting them down, is a sign of change.

That said, we know better than to be complacent. Power cuts still happen too often; internet quality is still far from great. And the Anglophone regions of Cameroon are still mired in a broader conflict that is not yet resolved. Any flare-up could threaten to undo gains if we’re not vigilant. Our job is to keep innovating and pushing for accountability, to ensure that what happened from 2016–2021 – the blackouts, the shutdowns – never happens again. We channel the same persistence that got us through those dark days into creating a brighter future.

The Unbreakable Mountain

A local saying in pidgin English has become something of a motto for Cameroonian techies: “Who no go, no know.” Loosely, it means if you haven’t gone through it, you can’t truly understand it. We have gone through it – through nights with no electricity and months with no internet – and we came out the other side. Those experiences, as painful as they were, taught us resilience in a way no Silicon Valley startup bootcamp ever could. We learned to do much with little, and something with nothing.

Today, when I see a group of University of Buea students huddled around a single laptop, debugging code despite a power outage (the laptop glowing on battery, everyone else using phone flashlights for illumination), I don’t feel pity. I feel pride and confidence. This next generation is inheriting not just our challenges, but also our ingenuity and grit. They know that a blackout isn’t the end – it might just be the beginning of a new idea. They know that being offline is a setback, not a death sentence, and there’s always a way to leapfrog forward when the connection returns.

Cameroon’s tech story is still being written, in fits and starts, in binary 1s and 0s that sometimes blink off but always come back on. We’ve gone from blackouts to startups, from shutdowns to breakthroughs. The journey has not been easy – innovation here is forged in hardship – but that’s exactly why it’s special. Our challenges did not crush us; they chiseled us into problem-solvers of the highest calibre. In the process, we’ve built a community that’s as robust as the volcanic rock of Mount Cameroon itself.

So the next time you hear about an African tech hub thriving against the odds, remember tiny Silicon Mountain and the nation around it. Remember that behind the apps and innovations coming out of Cameroon are stories of people who kept coding through candlelit nights and fought for their right to connect. Our example shows that resilience isn’t just a buzzword – it’s written in every line of code we publish under less-than-ideal conditions. The world would do well to take note: if adversity breeds strength, then Cameroon’s techies might just be among the strongest of all. And we’re just getting started.