Every day, the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Africa, home to 1.4 billion people and one of the fastest growing mobile populations on earth, contributes a significant and rising share of that torrent.
By 2030, the continent's data economy is projected to be worth $290 billion. Yet Africa's share of actual value captured from the global data economy remains below three percent. The data is here. The wealth it should be generating is not. The gap between those two facts is not a technology problem. It is a governance problem.
When an international investor sits down to assess an African market, one of the first questions they ask is: what does the data say? What is the consumption trend in this sector? What is the demographic profile of this city?
In most of our countries, the honest answer is that nobody knows, at least not officially. The data exists somewhere. It lives in the servers of global technology platforms, in the back offices of mobile operators, in the filing portals of government agencies that have never been asked to share what they hold. There is no framework to surface it, no policy to govern its use, and no infrastructure to process it at scale.
The result is a paradox that is quietly strangling African economic growth. For the past decade, the continent's policy conversation has been almost entirely consumed by the question of how to protect personal data from misuse. That conversation was necessary. Kenya's Data Protection Act, the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, and the AU's own frameworks were important steps. But somewhere along the way, protection became the whole story, and that is where we went wrong.
