A new Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report, titled “Advancing Africa’s AI and Digital Economy,” has warned that the continent risks falling into a familiar historical trap: exporting raw data to feed proprietary models built abroad, only to buy the technology back under expensive licences.

The report highlighted a stark economic imbalance. While AI development is set to inject $15.7 trillion into global GDP by 2030, Africa’s digital economy is expanding too slowly to keep pace. It currently represents just five per cent of continental GDP, trailing the global average of 15 per cent. On its current trajectory, it will reach only 8.5 per cent by 2050.

BCG Managing Director and Senior Partner, Head of BCG Tech Hub in Africa and a co-author of the report, Hamid Maher, said: “Africa’s core challenge is no longer about technology adoption; it is about tech production.

“We have the world’s youngest population and the fastest-growing cloud market, but we lack the foundational infrastructure to own our digital future.”

Winning requires capturing value from the technology stack itself – building, governing, and retaining our data and talent locally.”

BCG observed that Africa accounted for 18 per cent of the global population but possesses less than one per cent of the world’s data centre capacity. Further, large language models (LLMs) adequately support less than two per cent of the continent’s estimated 2,000 languages.

As highlighted in BCG’s companion report, ‘Strengthening the Africa-Europe Corridor – A Strategic Imperative in a Multipolar World’, Africa’s trade coverage ratio for services with the U.S. was 51 per cent in 2024, reflecting an extreme concentration of tech power.

With U.S. digital platforms commanding market capitalisations between $1 trillion and $5 trillion, dwarfing global competitors, Nigeria and other African countries face an accelerating risk of an ever-widening tech deficit. Without immediate local value capture, the continent risks a structural dependency where its clinical, behavioural, and environmental data are treated as raw materials exported to feed proprietary models built abroad, only to return home under license.

To reverse this outflow of economic benefits, the Advancing Africa’s AI and Digital Economy report outlined three key structural constraints that are contributing to underdeveloped digital infrastructure and weak foundations for AI enablement across Africa.

These are fragmentation, brain drain, and reliance on imported systems.