Africa's Economies and Technology Today
Africa's economic diversity, commodity dependence, the mobile revolution and M-Pesa, Nigerian payments infrastructure (NIBSS, NIP) and fintech, startup funding and its cycles, undersea cables and data centres, electricity and FX constraints, the African Continental Free Trade Area, Chinese and Western investment, creative industries, the demographic dividend, and where engineers fit in.
Building on a young continent
Africa is not one economy: Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa are the largest by GDP, while some of the fastest-growing economies over the past two decades have been smaller ones such as Ethiopia, Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire. By UN projections, Africa will account for a large share of the world's population growth this century, so the continent's choices about education, infrastructure and jobs matter globally.
For engineers, the continent's constraints are design inputs: intermittent connectivity and power (offline-first apps, Mobile course P7), low-end devices (Mobile P6), real-time payments with ambiguous failures (Ledgers course), and regulation that is still evolving (data protection, Backend Disciplines P5).
GSMA, The Mobile Economy: Sub-Saharan Africa (annual); NIBSS annual reports; World Bank, Africa's Pulse (biannual); AfCFTA Secretariat; UN World Population Prospects.