From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com
© 2024 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
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The Economist
Weak digital infrastructure is holding the continent back ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
More than two decades ago The Economist calculated that all of Africa had less international bandwidth than Brazil. Alas, until 2023 that was still true. Africa’s lack of connectivity is one reason its people could miss out on the benefits promised by artificial intelligence (AI).
For decades, experts have called for better broadband across Africa, citing the gains in productivity and employment. But the economic potential of AI, and its insatiable computing appetite, have renewed the case for urgent investment in the physical sinews needed to sustain a new digital revolution.
Fortunately, Africa has a home-grown model it can emulate. Its embrace of mobile phones in the early 2000s was a stunning feat of economic liberalisation. In most parts of Africa, businesses and consumers used to have to wait years to get a fixed-line phone. Nigeria, which has Africa’s biggest population (now more than 220m-strong), had just 450,000 phone lines in 1999, of which perhaps a third were on the blink. But when governments allowed privately owned mobile-phone companies to offer their services, they rapidly displaced the lethargic state-owned telcos.
It was a lesson in development done effectively, but frugally. Now sub-Saharan Africa has around 500m mobile subscriptions, roughly half of them associated with internet-capable smartphones. Mobile-phone services directly contribute $170bn to Africa’s GDP. More important, they make almost everyone from small farmers to market traders more productive, boosting growth and incomes throughout the economy.
Alas, this spectacular leapfrogging has downsides. The focus on mobile is one reason behind Africa’s underinvestment in fast fibre-optic connections. Although mobile phones have enabled mobile money and government services, such as digital ID, they can take economies only so far, especially when most parts of Africa have relatively slow 2G or 3G networks.
Fibre can carry more traffic, and faster. This allows seamless video calls, reduces dizzying lags in augmented-reality apps for, say, training surgeons and lets people interact with AI chatbots and other online services. Yet Africa is poorly served by subsea internet cables. Moreover, much of the internet bandwidth that lands on the coasts is wasted because of a lack of high-capacity overland cables to carry it to the interior. Worse, the continent does not have enough data centres—the brick-and-mortar sites where cloud computing happens. The Netherlands, population 18m, has more of these than all of Africa and its 1.5bn people. As a result, data must cross half the world and back, leading to painful delays. If Africans are to do movie animation, run sophisticated weather forecasts or train large language models with local content, they will need more computing capacity closer to home.
To fix this, governments should learn from the mobile boom and cut red tape. Starlink, a satellite-internet firm, could be a stopgap, but regulators have blocked it in at least seven countries including South Africa. Heavy taxes on data access drive up costs for consumers, discouraging them from using it and firms from investing in providing it. Governments could do much to help simply by getting out of the way.
Development institutions, for their part, should be doing more to help finance this vital infrastructure because of its widespread benefits for growth and employment. The new digital revolution will create opportunities for Africa to catch up with rich countries. But if the continent lacks the right infrastructure, it will instead fall further behind.
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