Africa's $100 trillion opportunity hides in its broken systems

Elon Musk didn’t just dream about rockets; he saw the bigger picture.

For him, rockets were a way to unlock a whole new economic world. Launch systems, satellite networks, orbital supply chains—SpaceX built the groundwork first, knowing the flights would come later. 

Africa keeps spotting broken systems and then writing reports about them. The chance to fix things sits there, waiting.

This Week’s Signal  

There’s a story told about a lion that escaped from a park and started killing cows in a nearby village. Panic spread in the entire village; villagers were scared and armed with bows and arrows, ready to call all lions on sight.

The government sent a team of rangers who showed up with loaded rifles ready for action. Villagers thought the hunt was on. But one ranger paused. He brought in a skilled vet, who asked to examine the carcass. 

The villagers enquired why, and the vet said that since the villagers are ready to kill all lions in the area, it was important first to ascertain if it was one or many lions that escaped.

The villagers had concluded that lions had changed their diet to specifically cows. With surgical precision, he examined the carcasses. 

The vet’s postmortem report concluded that it was only one lion that had a terrible tooth infection. The lion was starving and couldn’t hunt as usual. With that conclusion, they tracked down the lion. They spotted it, tranquillised it, and the vet attended to its tooth infection. 

After three days, the lion was back to hunting in its natural environment. The ranger solved what was actually broken.

Pause. As a leader, what can we learn from this story? This is exactly Africa’s crossroads right now: do you just fight symptoms, or do you fix the root cause? 

What It Means for Business 

Back in 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Joy Buolamwini tested facial recognition software. For light-skinned men, the error rate was under one per cent. For darker-skinned women, it jumped to 35 per cent. The problem wasn’t broken code; it was biased data. IBM and Microsoft went back and fixed it.

Now, a lot of African governments and businesses keep feeding artificial intelligence (AI) with scattered, incomplete paper files and expect miracles. Rwanda took a different approach; it digitised all its land records.

Disputes that once dragged on for years now get resolved in weeks. Costs dropped. Investors showed up. You can’t just throw good tech at bad systems and expect results. But you can build better systems.  In business terms, the sick lion represented a business that is not able to scale until it changes its products, service delivery and strategy.

The vet represents a skilled employee, as per last week’s Foresight advice: always hire and appreciate based on skills. Skills influence how problems in your business get solved in real time and with the right solutions. To businesses: on data, tech it up and organise it now. 

What It Means for Policy 

Africa has the brains. What it’s missing is infrastructure. Only five per cent of AI researchers have enough computing power.

A single high-powered Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) costs up to $40,000 (Sh5.1 million), which represents 75 per cent of our country’s GDP per capita. Policy can flip this.

Think stable electricity, affordable internet, easy access to data centres, and real incentives to keep talent home.   

Pilot projects aren’t enough anymore. You need national systems. Governments should focus on real infrastructure; short-term experiments make it easier to build AI in Nairobi or Lagos than to lose talent to other countries.

Invest in infrastructure that actually scales. 

What It Means for People  

When systems don’t collect good data, people and places just disappear from the map, loans get denied, there is a loss of assets, including physical assets, medical results are delayed, and identities get mixed up.

Build structured, digital, inclusive databases, and everything changes. Africans stop being the exception; they become the standard.  

Nigeria, Kenya, and Rwanda are rolling out national databases for land, health and education. But pilots have to scale up.

These systems need to reach every farmer, patient, and student. If the infrastructure isn’t complete, innovation will just remain on the runway with no expected take-off. 

The villagers in the lion story represent the unskilled employees in a business whose advice is not data-driven. Based on emotions and face value. 

Afterthought 

SpaceX grabbed a $100 trillion chance by building the basics first. Africa’s got the talent to pull off something just as big, but it needs to focus on infrastructure, not just on pointing out what’s broken.

Treat the tooth; don’t kill all the lions in the park. Build the economy, then watch what happens. “Decisions happen on the radar screen, but the future is yours.”   

- The writer is a human-centred strategist and leadership columnist