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By Mohamed Moniem, Regional Director, North Africa, ALX Africa
Africa is entering a defining period in its economic development. Across the continent, governments are investing in infrastructure, businesses are exploring new markets, entrepreneurs are building for scale, and policymakers are looking for ways to translate Africa’s enormous potential into sustainable economic growth.
This ambition was evident at the inaugural Alamein Africa Forum in Egypt, held from 2 to 4 October 2026, which brought together political leaders, investors, businesses and entrepreneurs around a central challenge: how does Africa move from potential to implementation?
For me, one answer stood out across conversations on technology, infrastructure and entrepreneurship: AI will succeed or fail on people, not technology.
There is understandably significant excitement around data centres, computing capacity, AI models and investment. These are important. But every conversation about infrastructure eventually comes back to a more fundamental question: do we have enough people who can build, operate, adapt and extract value from these technologies?
Digital sovereignty needs local capability
This is where Africa’s opportunity lies. Consider the growing push for African data centres and digital infrastructure. It is tempting to equate sovereignty with ownership. But a country can own a data centre and still depend almost entirely on external expertise to operate, maintain and develop what sits inside it.
This is not full sovereignty. It is dependency on better infrastructure. True digital sovereignty means having local engineers who can build and maintain critical systems, entrepreneurs who can develop products on top of them, researchers who can generate knowledge from African data, and businesses capable of converting technology into economic value.
This is particularly important as AI becomes more embedded in national economies. Africa does not need to win a race to build the most data centres. We are unlikely to outspend the world’s largest economies on computing infrastructure. But AI tools are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The competitive gap is increasingly about knowing what to do with them.
The same principle helped drive the continent’s mobile revolution. Adoption happened rapidly because people learned how to use new technology to solve everyday problems. AI can follow a similar path if skills development moves at the same pace as infrastructure investment.
Closing the gap between access and capability
The numbers make the distinction between access and capability clear. GSMA’s Mobile Economy Africa 2026 report estimates that around 63% of Africa’s population lived within mobile broadband coverage but did not use mobile internet in 2025. Affordability remains a major barrier, alongside digital skills and other social factors. Connectivity gets people online; capability determines what they can do once they get there. There is another lesson Africa cannot afford to ignore.
For decades, we have exported raw commodities and imported finished products. We exported cocoa and imported chocolate. In the AI economy, we must be careful not to repeat the same pattern with data.
African workers are already participating in the global AI economy, including through data labelling and other forms of outsourced digital work. This participation matters, but it cannot be the destination.
The ambition should be to move people progressively higher up the value chain: from labelling data to managing data; from using AI tools to building AI products; from providing services to owning companies and intellectual property.
When a government signs an agreement for a data centre, fibre network or subsea cable, skills development should not be an afterthought. It should be part of the deal. A major infrastructure project should come with a clear commitment to developing the local engineers, technicians and entrepreneurs who will operate it and build businesses around it.
It is a relatively small line in a large contract, but it can determine who captures the value of that investment for the next 20 years.
AI transformation is a talent investment
For founders and business leaders, the temptation is to see AI transformation primarily as a technology purchase. But buying the tools is often the easy part. The difficult part is changing how people work.
An organisation can have access to the most sophisticated AI platform and still see little productivity gain if its people do not understand how to use it, question its output, redesign workflows around it and apply human judgement.
For African businesses, this makes talent development a strategic investment, not an HR initiative. It also changes what makes a successful AI company defensible. The model itself is unlikely to be the moat. Models are becoming increasingly accessible, and competitors can build capable products faster than ever.
What is harder to replicate is customer trust, proprietary data generated through serving real customers, deep knowledge of local markets and, above all, a team that keeps learning.
Keep the pathway for junior talent
This is why Africa must resist the instinct to stop investing in junior talent simply because AI can automate some junior-level tasks. If businesses stop hiring entry-level talent today, where will tomorrow’s senior engineers, product leaders and founders come from?
The smarter approach is to use AI to accelerate how juniors learn rather than eliminate the pathway through which they become experts. This is where institutions such as ALX have an important role to play.
Africa needs talent institutions that do more than teach technical skills. We need to build people who can use AI from day one, think critically about its application, solve problems in African contexts and continue learning as the technology changes.
At ALX, this means combining technology and AI education with entrepreneurship and career development. ALX reports more than 347,000 graduates and an aggregate work-related impact figure exceeding 257,000, encompassing graduate employment, supported entrepreneurs and jobs created through their businesses. These are cumulative figures reported by ALX, rather than a graduate placement rate.
The objective is not simply to produce people who can code. It is to expand the pool of people capable of creating value with technology, whether as engineers, founders, analysts, creatives, operators or business leaders.
This matters because many of the jobs Africa will need in the next decade will be created by businesses that do not yet exist.
The Alamein Africa Forum’s emphasis on implementation, investment, entrepreneurship and cross-border economic integration therefore has a direct connection to the AI conversation. Infrastructure, capital and policy can create conditions for growth. But people determine whether those conditions translate into businesses, jobs and lasting value.
Turning AI potential into economic value
Africa’s AI opportunity is real. A 2025 African Development Bank report estimates that inclusive AI adoption could generate up to US$1 trillion in additional GDP by 2035. This is a conditional projection, not a guaranteed outcome: realising the gains depends on progress in infrastructure, data, skills, governance and capital.
The lesson is straightforward: we should not measure Africa’s AI readiness only by how many data centres we build, how much capital we attract or how many models we deploy. We should also ask how many Africans can build with them, improve them, commercialise them and create entirely new solutions around them.
About the author
Mohamed Moniem is Regional Director for North Africa at ALX Africa, where he leads efforts to expand access to technology-driven learning and career opportunities across the region. His work focuses on developing Africa’s talent and preparing young people for the future of work. He participated in the Alamein Africa Forum in Egypt.
Sources and information
- GSMA — The Mobile Economy Africa 2026 (2025 connectivity data).
- African Development Bank — Africa’s AI Productivity Gain (2025 report).
- ALX — published breakdown of its graduate and work-related impact figures. Company-reported figures; the cumulative scope was clarified by ALX’s representatives.
- African Union — inaugural Alamein Africa Forum.
Related reading: Africa’s AI Productivity Push Needs a Talent-Pipeline Strategy; From Skills to Jobs: Why Africa’s Digital Economy Needs Stronger Sector Coordination.