Five rules for technology leapfrogging in Africa
Much of my career has been spent trying to harness technology to tackle development challenges, primarily in energy, climate, and digital infrastructure across Africa. But that mission quickly evolved into something else: tempering expectations. From questioning quick-fix energy solutions to pushing back on inflated artificial intelligence (AI) narratives, I’ve become a reluctant tech-skeptic. Not because I doubt the power of technology to solve pressing societal problems but because I’ve seen what happens when it’s treated as a silver bullet.
The concept of technological leapfrogging, by which developing countries can skip traditional development stages or specific incumbent technologies and adopt newer approaches, has dominated African development discourse for decades. Mobile phones are the canonical success story, with Africa’s rapid adoption in the mid-1990s to 2000s fueling optimism about replicating this phenomenon across sectors. Yet for all its ubiquity in policy discourse and development strategies, leapfrogging remains a fuzzy and romanticized concept—a form of radical techno-optimism that treats Africa as a blank canvas for grand experiments, unconstrained by facts on the ground. It’s time to bring more discipline and nuance to how we understand and deploy it.
Drawing on more than a decade of working on African energy transitions and technology policy, I offer five key reflections, or rules, for how to think about leapfrogging more clearly and constructively in the African context.
This piece was originally published in Science on July 31, 2025. Read the full article here.
