Africa risks exporting raw data to feed artificial intelligence (AI) models built abroad, only to buy back the resulting technology under expensive licences, a new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) warns.
The report, titled “Advancing Africa’s AI and Digital Economy,” says the continent’s digital economy currently accounts for just 5 percent of continental GDP, against a global average of 15 percent, and is on track to reach only 8.5 percent by 2050 without intervention.
This comes even as AI development is projected to add $15.7 trillion to global GDP by 2030.
Hamid Maher, BCG Managing Director and Senior Partner and Head of the BCG Tech Hub in Africa, said the continent’s challenge has shifted from technology adoption to technology production.
“We have the world’s youngest population and the fastest-growing cloud market, but we lack the foundational infrastructure to own our digital future,” Maher said. “Winning requires capturing value from the technology stack itself, building, governing, and retaining our data and talent locally.”
The report notes that Africa holds 18 percent of the world’s population but less than 1 percent of global data centre capacity, while large language models adequately support fewer than 2 percent of the continent’s roughly 2,000 languages.
It also flags a widening digital services gap, with Africa’s trade coverage ratio for services with the United States falling to 51 percent in 2024, against US digital platforms valued between $1 trillion and $5 trillion.
BCG identifies three structural constraints holding back the continent: fragmentation across 54 economies, none exceeding $500 billion in GDP; a brain drain that sees 38 percent of Africa’s 62,000 AI specialists working remotely for foreign firms; and heavy reliance on imported systems, with African companies paying up to 35 percent more than global peers for the same technology.
To reverse the trend, the report recommends building infrastructure through public-private partnerships where governments retain ownership while the private sector handles execution, citing Rwanda’s IremboGov platform as an example. It also calls for pooling investment at national or regional level to lower infrastructure costs, and adopting open-source digital systems to retain technical talent and value locally, pointing to Morocco’s use of the open-source MOSIP platform for its national population register.
Patrick Dupoux, BCG Managing Director, Senior Partner and report co-author, said building strong domestic tech ecosystems is becoming an economic imperative as agentic AI and robotics disrupt traditional development pathways such as call centres and manufacturing.
“Africa has both the ambition and the talent to shape its own digital future. By strengthening its digital foundations and retaining more value locally, the continent can transition from a digital consumer to a digital value creator in the global AI economy,” Dupoux said.
