An island-wide ICT infrastructure master plan for Zanzibar

I coordinated the development of an island-wide ICT Infrastructure Master Plan for Zanzibar: a strategic roadmap covering the archipelago’s entire fiber backbone and data center estate, paired with a full feasibility study for a disaster recovery site on Pemba Island. I served as Project Coordinator on a sub-contracted engagement delivered for the Zanzibar Communication Corporation.

This was a planning engagement, not a build. The deliverables are documents: assessments, designs, specifications, and a phased implementation roadmap. I include it here because coordination work of this kind is a real discipline, and because the plan gives Zanzibar a reference for sequencing its infrastructure investment.

The challenge

Zanzibar’s digital ambitions were running ahead of its infrastructure planning. The islands’ fiber backbone and data centers had grown piecemeal, and the gaps were structural: incomplete network coverage, thin redundancy, uneven security, and no disaster recovery capability at all. Critical government and private-sector data sat in facilities with no fallback. A serious disruption at the primary sites would have taken essential services down with no continuity plan behind them.

Without a master plan, every infrastructure decision was being made in isolation. Digital government services, economic development programs, and data protection efforts each needed the backbone to be something it wasn’t yet, and no single document said what it needed to become, in what order, or at what cost.

The approach

My job was coordination: keeping a technically broad, multi-stakeholder study moving on schedule, and making sure the individual workstreams consolidated into one coherent plan rather than a stack of disconnected reports. The work ran in three streams.

Current-state assessment. I coordinated the evaluation of Zanzibar’s entire fiber backbone and data center infrastructure, documenting strengths, weaknesses, and areas requiring improvement, and facilitated stakeholder consultations across government agencies, telecommunications providers, and private-sector entities. Getting these groups to agree on what actually exists is harder than it sounds; the consultations were as much about reconciling competing accounts as about gathering facts.

Master plan development. I oversaw the drafting of the plan itself: network redundancy routes, ISP gateways, microwave links, and coverage targets for every region, plus data center specifications covering redundancy, power supply, cooling, and physical security.

Disaster recovery feasibility. I managed the complete technical, operational, and financial assessment for establishing a DR site on Pemba Island: site selection criteria, data center construction specifications, network connectivity options, and data replication strategies.

The reporting cadence of inception, interim, draft, and final reports, with architecture designs alongside, meant stakeholders reviewed and corrected the work at every stage instead of receiving a finished plan they had no hand in shaping.

The outcome

The engagement delivered the ICT Infrastructure Master Plan covering all regions of Zanzibar, a single strategic document the government can sequence its infrastructure investment against.

Alongside it: the Pemba Island disaster recovery feasibility study, complete with architecture designs, technical specifications, and construction plans for a facility built to international standards; network optimization recommendations across the fiber backbone, redundancy routes, and coverage expansion; and a cost-benefit analysis with a phased implementation timeline and clear milestones.

The plan also carried forward-looking recommendations: cybersecurity strengthening, data protection compliance, and digital hub development to support growth across tourism, trade, education, healthcare, and agriculture.

The deliverable set ran to nine documents in total. The honest measure of a planning engagement isn’t the page count, though. It’s whether the client can now make infrastructure decisions against a shared reference instead of case by case. That’s what Zanzibar has: a documented current state, an agreed target architecture, and a costed path between the two, including the disaster recovery capability the islands previously lacked entirely.