Lesotho has become the first country to apply the United Nations Blueprint for National AI and Data Strategies, and has begun Phase One of a National Compute Roadmap running from 2026 to 2029.
Prime Minister Samuel Ntsokoane Matekane announced the milestone at the UN’s second Digital Cooperation Day in New York. The underlying work was a workshop held in Maseru from 17 to 21 August, coordinated by the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies in support of the Resident Coordinator’s Office.
Demand before hardware
The methodology is what distinguishes this.
Sessions covered compute demand, energy, connectivity, data governance, skills, financing and institutional models — alongside the environmental and social dimensions of data centres including energy, water and carbon. Participants worked through what must come first, what should be built versus shared, what demand actually exists, and how capacity can scale. By the end of the week they had produced a draft national roadmap for computing capacity.
That sequence is the reverse of how most African compute projects have gone.
Kenya’s $1 billion Microsoft and G42 data centre at Olkaria was announced during a Washington state visit in May 2024. It stalled after its power requirement was revised from 60MW to 1,000MW against a national grid of roughly 3,000MW, and after the government declined to guarantee uptake of the computing capacity. Those are demand and energy questions, addressed after the announcement rather than before it.
Matekane made the same point about justification. Lesotho already has three digital policies, a government data centre and a Chief Digital Officer, he said — and infrastructure investment must be warranted by tangible improvements in people’s lives.
The cooling advantage
Acting Prime Minister Justice Nthomeng Majara made the argument at the Maseru workshop that gives Lesotho a genuine claim: its cool highlands and abundant water place it among the few countries able to cool data centres at scale.
That matters more this year than it would have last year. Water has become the sharpest objection to African data centre expansion. Cape Town advocacy group Housing Assembly and UK nonprofit Foxglove filed a legal challenge in August against two proposed Equinix facilities, putting their combined consumption at over 4.4 billion litres annually — as much as 18,000 homes. eThekwini councillors withheld support for a Durban facility pending water disclosure. AI implementation specialist Dr Francois du Plessis argued in these pages that South Africa should not compete to host large facilities at all, given water and electricity constraints.
Lesotho sits at altitude with the Lesotho Highlands Water Project behind it. Lower ambient temperatures reduce cooling load; water availability removes the scarcity argument that has stalled projects elsewhere.
The announcement does not address electricity, which is the other half of the equation and the one Lesotho has not publicly answered.
Built for constrained planning
The UN Blueprint is designed for resource-constrained contexts, which fits a country with an economy based largely on farming and primary industry.
The workshop drew on UNDP, UNICEF, the ITU, UNESCO, the World Bank and the OECD, alongside practitioners from Senegal, Ethiopia and Guinea sharing experience of national AI programmes and investment.
That peer element is worth noting. Ethiopia has been building institutions rapidly — an AI Institute, an AI UniPod, a planned AI university — while the World Bank advised in August that it focus on adoption and adaptation before frontier ambitions. Lesotho appears to be starting where the Bank suggested Ethiopia should.
The Blueprint launches formally on Digital Cooperation Day, 21 September, with Guinea confirmed as the next country to apply it.
What comes next
Phase One runs to 2029. No cost, capacity target or specific deliverables have been published, and those are the figures that will indicate whether the roadmap is a plan or a document.
Africa currently holds roughly 409 megawatts of operational data centre capacity — under 1% of the global total, against a fifth of the world’s population. The International Finance Corporation estimates reaching one gigawatt could cost up to $8 billion.
Lesotho will not build a meaningful share of that. What it may demonstrate is the order of operations — and on the evidence of Olkaria, that is worth more than another announcement.
