  It is widely recognised that collaboration can help fast-track the
development of countries in Africa. Leveraging on the fourth industrial
revolution, Africa can achieve accelerated development in health care services,
educational systems and socio-economic infrastructures. While a number of
conceptual frameworks have been proposed for the African continent, many have
discounted the Cloud infrastructure used for data storage and processing, as
well as the underlying network infrastructure upon which such frameworks would
be built. This work therefore presents a continental network model for
interconnecting nations in Africa through its data centres. The proposed model
is based on a multilayer network engineering approach, which first groups
African countries into clusters of data centres using a hybrid combination of
clustering techniques; then utilizes Ant Colony Optimization with Stench
Pheromone, that is modified to support variable evaporation rates, to find the
ideal network path(s) across the clusters and the continent as a whole. The
propsoed model takes into consideration the geo-spatial location, population
sizes, data centre counts and intercontinental submarine cable landings of each
African country, when clustering and routing. For bench-marking purposes, the
path selection algorithm was tested on both the obtained clusters and African
Union's regional clusters.
