Amadou Diop President at MNS Consulting Group

Africa with its 1.3 billion inhabitants is undoubtedly a demographic power and the opportunity of Leap Frogging or technological leap offered by mobile telephony has enabled the continent to align itself on the international digital agenda and to consecrate its anchoring in the information society. Digital now represents between 7 and 10% of the GDP for many African countries.

However, Africa is only present on a fraction of the global digital value chain because it does neither design nor produce the equipment and systems that it has so wonderfully appropriated.

This technological dependency is a fact, but Africa should not accept that the rules of the game to be decided elsewhere and without it at a time when the sector is undergoing profound transformations that will accelerate in the coming years.

These transformations are primarily technological with the development of 5G, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Big data, IoT, Blockchain and Quantum computing. They will create serious challenges of value destruction for certain players in the ecosystem, of sovereignty and security for states. For citizens, they will pose the problem of digital identity, data protection and the question of our very existence in the digital space.

Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/urgency-african-digital-act-amadou-diop/