Despite decades of investment and regulatory efforts, Africa's Internet ecosystem still relies heavily on infrastructure far outside the continent, routing traffic through Europe and outsourcing critical services like DNS resolution. This dependence on foreign infrastructure exacerbates the impact of subsea cable cuts and exposes a deeper problem. That is, the continent's connectivity fabric remains externally dependent and structurally fragile. Existing measurement tools fail to illuminate this reality, either by missing key components or offering insufficient visibility. We argue for a rethinking of how we monitor and support Africa's Internet infrastructure. Our vision is a purpose-built testbed that combines crowd-sourced vantage points with intentional, context-aware targeting to better capture the unique Internet ecosystem of the continent. Rather than simply retrofitting global solutions, we propose building with the realities of Africa's ecosystem in mind.

Africa lags behind in broadband connectivity and performance. The internet cost remains significantly higher compared to the Global North, and users experience network delays, availability issues, and slow speeds. Several studies demonstrated that measuring internet performance in Africa will provide a better understanding of the reasons underpinning poor broadband performance and ultimately driving substantial improvements. While internet measurement is critical on the continent, effective measurement requires robust infrastructure. We recognize that robust network measurement is expensive but need to be context-based and involve all the internet stakeholders from users to regulators to service providers and more. However, current measurement tools are mostly designed in the West and do not necessarily reflect Africa's broadband measurement challenges. To address this, we propose in this work a cost-effective and context-based mobile broadband measurement infrastructure.

Although the Internet ecosystem in East Africa has experienced significant growth as evidenced by the 115% increment in Internet users in Sub-Sharan Africa, we understand very little about the infrastructure's performance which is crucial, particularly in DNS resolution, ISP peering, and the use of IXPs. Previous studies highlighting the importance of IXPs and their positive impact on connectivity are qualitative with limited participants, limiting their completeness. To achieve a nuanced understanding of the East African Internet landscape, a more extensive and diverse sample size is needed, integrating both context from qualitative with the scale from quantitative methods. Additionally, prior studies focus on the period following the installation of submarine fiber-optic cables, which may not fully capture the current state of the Internet ecosystem. This study aims to use a mixed methods approach to provide a comprehensive assessment of the Internet infrastructure in East Africa.