Ofovwe Aig-Imoukhede reflects on Africa’s digital public infrastructure
At the Africa CEO Forum’s LEAD roundtable on Digital Public Infrastructure and AI, I sat in a room full of genuinely brilliant people: ministers, technologists, investors, development finance leaders, and builders, all united by the urgency of a shared question: how does Africa move from being a consumer of the digital economy to a producer within it? The conversation was rich and, in many moments, inspiring. But there was something I felt compelled to say, something that risks being drowned out by the excitement of the possible.
We need to go back to basics. Before we build the future, we need to reckon with what we have failed to fix.
The white paper framing the session was honest about the structural barriers holding Africa back: fragmentation across 55 countries limiting the critical mass needed for investment; a talent pool that is growing but still insufficient and haemorrhaging through brain drain; and a dangerous tendency to rely on imported solutions that lock value outside the continent. These are real; I do not dispute them. What I want to push on is the assumption, often implicit in rooms like this one, that if we assemble the right technology stack and unlock the right financing, transformation will follow.
