African archipelago hopes startups, digital infrastructure and diaspora investment can transform its economy
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or much of its history since its discovery by the Portuguese in the mid-15th century, the Cape Verde archipelago off the coast of west Africa served as a hub of the international slave trade, with Africans forcibly transported to marketplaces before being distributed across the Americas and Europe.
Now, almost 150 years since slavery was abolished in Cape Verde, and just over 50 years since independence from Portugal, Pedro Fernandes Lopes wants the country to become a beacon for the free movement of human and financial capital across the African diaspora.
Lopes is Cape Verde’s secretary of state for the digital economy and an important figure in its drive to become a digital hub for west Africa and beyond, modelled in part on Estonia’s much-vaunted digitisation programme.
