This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Saturday morning by subscribing above.
It’s 2030, and more than two-thirds of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is now online. While this internet access is helping residents combat poverty, disease, illiteracy, and more, continuous effort will be required to ensure the benefits of the tech outweigh its potential harms.
Africa’s “digital decade”
It’s been 55 years since a team of researchers at UCLA sent a message from their university’s room-sized computer to another massive machine housed at Stanford, giving birth to the technology that would eventually become the internet.
Since then, computers have gotten small enough to carry around in our pockets, the wires are optional, and two-thirds of the world’s population is now online.
For individuals, this internet access has meant opportunities in work, education, healthcare, and more that aren’t available to those still offline. On a national level, digital connectivity has typically translated to a more productive workforce, higher standard of living, and economic growth.
These benefits are currently out of reach for the majority of people in the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, where the internet adoption rate is currently just 37%, but tech giant Google is predicting that the next 10 years could be the region’s “digital decade.”
To find out what that could mean for sub-Saharan Africa, let’s look at the history of digital tech on the continent, how Google is working to bring its own prediction to fruition, and what can be done to help ensure that internet access is a net positive for Africa’s most vulnerable residents.
Where we’ve been
Where we are
Sub-Saharan Africa — the part of the continent below the Sahara Desert — doesn’t just have the world’s lowest internet adoption rate. It’s also home to the majority of the world’s least-developed countries (LDCs).
These nations are characterized by low GDPs and populations experiencing high levels of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, gender inequality, and other barriers to sustainable development. Internet access could help break down these barriers, but LDCs have particularly low internet adoption rates, with just 27% of their residents online.
Internet access isn’t the only area where LDCs are lagging behind. Progress in technologies enabled by the internet, like AI, is advancing rapidly in developed nations, and according to the UN, the gap between the countries with the most advanced tech and those with the least is actually widening.
“The next decade is set to be sub-Saharan Africa’s digital decade.”
Matt Brittin
Getting sub-Saharan Africans online is the first step to closing that gap, and despite its still-low internet adoption numbers, the region is trending in the right direction — a Google-funded report by Public First, a public policy research agency, has predicted that more than half the area’s population will be online by 2026.
“The next decade is set to be sub-Saharan Africa’s digital decade — with emerging technologies set to significantly accelerate the continent’s development,” Matt Brittin, president of Google Europe, Middle East, and Africa, predicted in an October 2024 blog post.
Where we’re going (maybe)
To close the digital divide, the region first needs affordable, high-speed internet access. Its residents then need to be taught the skills needed to take advantage of the digital world.
Since opening its first office in sub-Saharan Africa in 2007, Google has invested millions into helping bring both access and education to the region — it’s partnered with manufacturers to make cheaper smartphones for the African market, helped millions of Africans access digital tools and training, and built Equiano, a subsea cable speeding up the connection between Africa and Europe.
In 2021, the tech giant announced its biggest initiative yet: a $1 billion investment over the next five years into Africa’s “digital transformation.”
“This research reaffirms the importance of our investments.”
Alex Okosi
Google says it has already spent $900 million on projects in Africa in the three years since announcing the investment, and according to the report it commissioned from Public First to look into its impact on sub-Sharan Africa, it’s on track to meet the $1 billion goal by 2026.
Among other things, the investment money has been used to open new AI labs in Ghana and Kenya, fund initiatives designed to support African founders, and create Africa’s first “Google Cloud” region and its first Google product development center.
“This research reaffirms the importance of our investments,” Alex Okosi, Google’s managing director for sub-Saharan Africa, wrote in the report’s forward. “Public First found that every $1 invested in digital technology in the region will generate over $2 in economic value by 2030, with an even greater return in front runner nations.”
“We don’t want to leave anyone behind.”
Alex Okosi
In May 2024, Google announced its next big project as part of the investment: building Umoja, the first subsea fiber-optic cable between Africa and Australia. According to Okosi, this will help address the two biggest barriers to closing the digital divide in the region: high data costs and connectivity challenges.
“Investing in infrastructure like Equiano and Umoja are going to help bring down these costs and enable businesses to hopefully tap into this digital highway that enables them to be more efficient,” he told CNN.
“We still need to partner with last-mile operators to make sure that they are leveraging this new bandwidth, and it’s bringing the cost down so the consumer can feel it,” Okosi added. “We don’t want to leave anyone behind, and the only way to ensure that is to make sure the cost of data is lower.”
In addition to sharing the update on its $1 billion investment, Google also recently announced that its philanthropic arm, Google.org, is committing $5.8 million in grants “to support AI skilling and education across sub-Saharan Africa.”
This money will help ensure that Africans are able to take advantage of the technology once they have access to it, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK-based charity focused on the promotion of computer science education, is one of its recipients.
“In Africa, we are partnering with Young Scientists Kenya and Data Scientists Network Foundation to roll out AI literacy education for Kenyan and Nigerian youth,” a spokesperson for the Foundation told Freethink of its plans for the grant.
“Young people need to be more than just consumers of technology. They need to be digital protagonists, able to confidently engage with and shape the digital world.”
A Raspberry Pi Foundation spokesperson
This education will include lessons on different types of AI, how machine learning can be used to solve problems, and the technology’s limitations. These lessons will be tailored to “students aged 11-14 with a focus on those from underserved communities,” according to the Foundation spokesperson.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is also launching several new resources focused on AI safety in Africa. One of these, “AI and Your Data,” is designed to get students thinking about how they share data with applications in the age of AI, while another focuses on how AI can be used to both perpetuate and combat misinformation.
“Young people need to be more than just consumers of technology,” the spokesperson told Freethink. “They need to be digital protagonists, able to confidently engage with and shape the digital world.”
Avoiding the pitfalls
This idea of Africans as tech consumers highlights the primary incentive Google and other tech companies have for helping close the digital divide in places like sub-Saharan Africa: more people online means more people using their products, which ultimately means greater profits.
“The big US tech giants have recognized the existing connectivity gaps and the need for additional investment associated with this as a major business opportunity,” Tevin Tafese, a data scientist at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, told German broadcaster DW.
“Prominent examples are Google and Meta, whose major cable projects are aimed at reducing the cost of accessing their own service in a largely untapped African market,” he continued.
This investment might seem like a win-win on the surface — Africans gain access to the digital world, while tech companies gain access to more customers — but the reality may be more complex, given the downside of the internet and modern tech.
“Virtually every day brings new stories about hatred being spread on social media, invasion of privacy by businesses and governments, cyber-attacks using weaponised digital technologies, or states violating the rights of political opponents,” the UN’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation wrote in a 2019 report.
These impacts can be felt by tech users across the globe, and it’s not clear how we can effectively address them in developed nations like the US, let alone in regions like sub-Saharan African, where resources are scarcer and much of the population is already incredibly vulnerable.
Joining the digital world also puts people living in LDCs at risk of experiencing “digital extractivism,” a practice that includes the exploitation of data and labor, according to a Stanford-funded report by researchers at Pollicy, a Uganda-based civic technology organization.
“Technology companies have exploited minimal data protection legislation and local competition to set up widespread software communication solutions for the African market to collect user data,” the authors write.
They also “hire digital workers from locations, such as within Africa, where hiring labour is cheaper or where labour laws might be weaker in a practice referred to as labour arbitrage,” Pollicy’s researchers add.
There are ways to prevent this exploitation and protect the Africans now coming online, according to Pollicy: campaigns can be organized to raise consumer rights awareness among new internet users, for example, and the strengthening of trade unions can help grant digital workers more bargaining power.
Ultimately, though, while the US and other developed nations might have a headstart on places like sub-Saharan Africa, the internet, AI, and other digital technologies are still relatively new inventions, and we’re all trying to figure out how to maximize their benefits while minimizing their harms — a particularly daunting task given how fast the tech is evolving.
As we navigate the ever-changing landscape of this digital world, stakeholders will need to take special care to protect its most vulnerable new residents through initiatives like the ones suggested by Pollicy and the ones being spearheaded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in order to ensure that Africa’s digital decade lives up to Google’s optimistic predictions for it.
We’d love to hear from you! If you have a comment about this article or if you have a tip for a future Freethink story, please email us at [email protected].
