Durban at 25: The Inequality We Have Not Yet Named

On 31 August 2001, the world came to Durban.

It came to South Africa.

It came to a country that only seven years earlier had dismantled apartheid and elected its first democratic government.

It came to a city whose own history was inseparable from the questions the conference had gathered to confront.

And it came to a continent whose encounter with the modern world had been shaped, for centuries, by slavery, colonial conquest, racial hierarchy and economic extraction.

The occasion was the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

It met in Durban from 31 August to 8 September 2001.

It was not an easy conference.

Nor was it supposed to be.

The questions before it were too large to be settled by diplomatic language alone.

They reached backwards into slavery.

Into colonialism.

Into conquest.

And they reached forwards into the continuing consequences of those histories.

They concerned discrimination.

They concerned poverty.

They concerned exclusion.

They concerned migration.

They concerned development.

But beneath all of these questions was another one.

A question about power.

Who had it?

Who had lost it?

Who had accumulated it?

And who continued to exercise it long after the formal structures that had produced it had supposedly disappeared?

That was part of what made Durban significant.

It refused to treat racism simply as a question of individual prejudice.

It placed racism within history.

It placed it within institutions.

It placed it within economic relationships.

It placed it within the lived experience of peoples whose present circumstances could not be understood without understanding their past.

This mattered.

Because inequalities are rarely born in a single moment.

They accumulate.

Capital accumulates.

Knowledge accumulates.

Infrastructure accumulates.

Institutions accumulate.

So does disadvantage.

Twenty-five years later, on this same date, we mark the International Day for People of African Descent.

The coincidence should make us pause.

Not simply to ask what has changed since Durban.

We should ask a more difficult question:

What has changed about the way inequality is produced?

That is a different question.

And it may be the more important one.

The problem of the twentieth century

Just over a century before Durban, in 1900, the Pan-African Congress was held in London from 23 to 25 July.

It was a watershed event.

It brought together delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Among them was Dr W.E.B. Du Bois, who led the American delegation and famously remarked:

"The problem of the twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line."

— W.E.B. Du Bois, Pan-African Congress, London, 1900

The observation was profound.

The Pan-African Congress of 1900 became a spiritual and intellectual precursor to the modern Pan-African movement. It brought Black intellectuals and activists from different parts of the world together to formulate a coordinated response to racial subjugation, colonialism and economic exploitation.

Its immediate political results were modest.

But the ideas did not remain modest.

The Congress helped establish a network and intellectual framework that would eventually contribute to the decolonisation of Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in the Americas.

What distinguished it from the World Conference Against Racism 101 years later was also significant.

The 1900 Congress was a gathering principally of Black leaders, intellectuals and activists from Africa and the African Diaspora.

Durban was different.

The world had been mobilised.

Heads of State and Government from across the world were present.

The problem of racism was no longer an issue of concern only among its victims.

It concerned governments.

It concerned institutions.

It concerned even the capitals that, a century earlier, had plotted, planned, orchestrated and defended the very systems against which the 1900 Congress had protested.

The journey from 1900 to Durban therefore represented more than the passage of a century.

It represented the movement of an issue from the margins of international concern to the centre of global political discourse.

1900 was no longer simply a gathering of the aggrieved.

It had helped set in motion a global movement.

And yet the question remains.

What has changed about the way inequality is produced?

Because the world of 2026 is not the world of 2001.

The technologies have changed.

The architecture of the global economy has changed.

The distribution of economic power has shifted.

China has become a far more consequential global economic actor.

Digital platforms have transformed commerce, communications and social life.

Artificial intelligence has moved from the pages of science fiction into boardrooms, universities, governments and ordinary workplaces.

But beneath these changes, some of the fundamental questions remain remarkably familiar.

Who owns the productive assets?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Who produces the knowledge?

Who determines the rules?

Who captures the value?

And who is left primarily to consume what others have built?

Those questions were present in Durban, even if they were not expressed in the vocabulary we would use today.

They are present now in another form.

And Africa needs to recognise that form before it becomes another structure of dependency that we spend the next generation trying to dismantle.

The promise of Durban

It is tempting, twenty-five years later, to reduce Durban to a declaration.

Declarations matter.

But they are not the same thing as transformation.

The significance of Durban was that it placed historical injustice and contemporary inequality in the same conversation.

It recognised that racial discrimination could not be separated neatly from the economic and social consequences of historical systems.

That insight remains important.

A person does not arrive in the world carrying an economic position created entirely by his or her own choices.

Nations do not enter the global economy from a common starting line.

Institutions do not emerge from nowhere.

Capital accumulates.

Knowledge accumulates.

Infrastructure accumulates.

So does disadvantage.

This is why historical memory is not an indulgence.

It is part of understanding the present.

But there is another lesson here.

If inequality is reproduced through systems, and reinforced or entrenched through institutions, then changing the language around inequality is not enough.

The systems themselves have to change.

And the institutions.

This is where the twenty-five-year retrospective becomes uncomfortable.

Because much has changed.

And much has not.

African countries have achieved political independence.

But as Kwame Nkrumah warned, that independence can be merely nominal when the underlying structures of economic dependence remain intact.

Most African countries have representative institutions.

The continent has created continental and regional organisations.

Millions of Africans have entered universities.

Mobile telecommunications have transformed daily life.

New businesses have emerged.

African cities have become major centres of commerce and culture.

A new generation of entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers and professionals is building things that were difficult to imagine a generation ago.

Africa is not where it was in 2001.

But neither is the global distribution of productive power where it needs to be.

The question is not whether Africans participate.

We do, albeit on unequal terms.

The question is whether we participate on terms that allow us to accumulate power.

That distinction matters.

Participation is not ownership

For much of the past two decades, the language used to describe Africa's economic prospects has become increasingly optimistic.

Africa is young.

Africa is urbanising.

Africa is digitising.

Africa is one of the world's fastest-growing consumer markets.

Africa has extraordinary entrepreneurial energy.

All of these statements contain truth.

But there is a question that should follow every one of them:

Rising into what?

A market can grow without becoming an industrial power.

A population can become connected without becoming technologically sovereign.

A country can attract investment without acquiring ownership of the technologies on which the investment depends.

A continent can produce talented graduates without producing enough institutions capable of converting knowledge into productive capacity.

And consumers can spend money on technology without owning the infrastructure through which that technology operates.

This is not an argument against globalisation.

Nor is it an argument for Africa to retreat behind technological or economic walls.

It is an argument for something more basic.

Participation is not the same as agency.

And agency requires capacity.

The distinction is not semantic.

If I use a system that somebody else owns, I am participating in that system.

If I help determine how that system is designed, financed, regulated and developed, I possess a measure of agency over it.

The difference becomes particularly important when the system itself becomes the infrastructure of economic life.

That is where the digital economy takes us.

And that is where the conversation about artificial intelligence becomes unavoidable.

The new machinery

When Durban took place in 2001, the internet was already changing the world, but the technological architecture we take for granted today was still in its formative years.

The smartphone had not yet become the ubiquitous device it would become.

Social media had not yet transformed political communication.

Cloud computing had not become the backbone of modern enterprise.

Generative artificial intelligence was not part of everyday vocabulary.

Today, these technologies are reshaping how economies operate.

But AI is different from many earlier digital technologies because it sits increasingly close to the production of knowledge itself.

It can write.

It can translate.

It can analyse.

It can generate images and software.

It can assist research.

It can increasingly perform tasks that previously depended on scarce human expertise.

This creates extraordinary possibilities for Africa.

A continent with shortages of specialised skills could use AI to extend the reach of those skills.

A student in a rural community could access forms of educational assistance previously available mainly to people in well-resourced institutions.

A small business could gain access to analytical and creative capabilities that would once have required an expensive consultancy.

African governments could use technology to improve service delivery.

African researchers could collaborate across borders.

African languages could be preserved, digitised and developed.

The African Union itself has recognised the strategic significance of this moment.

Its Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy describes AI as a strategic asset for Africa's development and promotes an Africa-centred, development-focused approach to AI.

"For Africa, AI is a strategic asset pivotal to achieving the aspirations of Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals."

— African Union

There is genuine possibility here.

But possibility is not ownership.

And this is where the old digital divide gives way to a more consequential one.

The first digital divide asked:

Who has access?

The next one asks:

Who owns the systems to which everyone else is gaining access?

That is a much harder question.

When inequality moves into the machine

There is another reason why the transition from Durban to artificial intelligence deserves our attention.

The United Nations has itself recognised that systemic racism does not simply disappear.

It can mutate.

In his 2024 message marking the International Day for People of African Descent, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that systemic racism continues to take new forms, including in new technologies where algorithms can amplify discrimination.

"Systemic racism is rife and continues to mutate into new forms – including in new technologies, where algorithms can amplify discrimination."

— António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General

This is an important observation.

Because the machine does not have to be explicitly racist for the outcome to be discriminatory.

An algorithm can reproduce the inequalities embedded in the data from which it learns.

A system can appear neutral while producing unequal outcomes.

A technology can be presented as objective while reflecting the assumptions, exclusions and power relationships of the society that produced it.

This means that the old question of racial inequality has not disappeared.

Part of it has migrated into the technological systems through which modern societies increasingly make decisions.

But the challenge is even broader than algorithmic discrimination.

It concerns ownership.

It concerns capability.

It concerns capital.

It concerns who builds the systems and who merely uses them.

The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether Africans have access to technology.

It is whether Africans have a meaningful role in designing, governing and owning the technologies that increasingly shape their lives.

From the digital divide to the ownership divide

For years, we correctly worried about connectivity.

Who has and owns the broadband?

Who has internet access?

Who has a smartphone?

Who can afford data?

Who has electricity?

These questions remain important.

But they are no longer sufficient.

Suppose every African has affordable high-speed internet.

Suppose every school has a computer.

Suppose every young person can access an AI assistant.

We would have made enormous progress.

But we would not necessarily have solved the problem of economic power.

Because the networks may still be owned elsewhere.

The cloud infrastructure may still be owned elsewhere.

The most advanced computing capacity may still be concentrated elsewhere.

The foundational models may still be developed elsewhere.

The intellectual property may still be controlled elsewhere.

The capital required to scale African technological companies may still be concentrated elsewhere.

And the data generated by African societies may still flow through systems whose economic value is captured elsewhere.

We would then have achieved something remarkable.

We would have democratised access to somebody else's infrastructure.

That is progress.

But it is not sovereignty.

And it is not enough.

The point is not simply that foreign ownership is inherently wrong.

The point is that ownership matters.

Data is not just information

There is a tendency to think of data as an abstract digital commodity.

It is not.

Data is increasingly part of the productive infrastructure of the modern economy.

The movements of people.

The transactions of consumers.

The languages they speak.

The questions they ask.

The crops they grow.

The businesses they establish.

The roads they travel.

The financial decisions they make.

The content they produce.

All of these generate information.

When aggregated, organised and analysed, that information can become economically valuable.

This creates a peculiar possibility.

Africa may generate enormous quantities of data while possessing insufficient capacity to extract the greatest value from it.

Not because data must never cross borders.

It must, and it does.

The global economy depends on the movement of information.

But movement is not the same as surrender.

And openness is not the same as power.

The real question is whether African societies possess the institutional, technological and intellectual capacity to determine how their data is collected, governed, processed and converted into value.

This is where the lessons of the past become relevant again.

Africa has known what it means to possess something valuable without controlling the system through which its value is realised.

For centuries, the continent exported commodities while much of the processing, financing, manufacturing and value addition occurred elsewhere.

The problem was not that Africa lacked resources.

The problem was that resource ownership and resource value were not the same thing.

We should not reproduce that mistake in digital form.

The danger of becoming the raw material of the AI age

There is a temptation to describe data as the new oil.

The analogy is imperfect.

But the underlying warning is useful.

Raw materials do not automatically produce prosperity.

They produce prosperity when societies possess the infrastructure, technology, skills, capital and institutions required to transform them into higher-value products.

The same principle applies to data.

And it applies to artificial intelligence.

If Africa supplies data, talent and markets while others supply the computing infrastructure, foundational models, capital and intellectual property, then Africa may become an important participant in the AI economy without becoming an important owner of it.

That distinction should trouble us.

Because this is how dependency can reproduce itself without looking like dependency.

Nobody needs to tell Africans that they are excluded.

They can be welcomed.

They can be connected.

They can be given access.

They can be celebrated as entrepreneurs.

They can even be recognised as one of the world's most important emerging consumer markets.

And still, the deepest layers of economic power can remain elsewhere.

This is why the language of inclusion, while necessary, is no longer sufficient.

We should also be speaking about ownership.

What did we learn from industrialisation?

There is nothing inevitable about technological progress producing shared prosperity.

History tells us otherwise.

Industrialisation transformed the productive capacity of societies.

But it also transformed the distribution of power.

Those who controlled capital, machines, infrastructure, finance and knowledge possessed advantages that those who merely supplied labour did not.

The countries that industrialised most successfully did not simply consume industrial products.

They built industrial capacity.

They innovated.

They developed institutions.

They trained engineers.

They financed enterprises.

They created research institutions.

They developed infrastructure.

They accumulated knowledge.

They learned how to manufacture.

They learned how to negotiate.

In other words, they built the capacity to determine their own economic trajectory.

Africa cannot reproduce those historical pathways mechanically.

The world has changed.

But the principle remains.

A society cannot outsource the foundations of its productive power indefinitely and expect to exercise strategic autonomy.

This is as true of computing as it was of steel.

It is as true of data centres as it was of railways.

It is as true of artificial intelligence as it was of industrial machinery.

The machinery has changed.

The question of who owns it has not.

Africa is not starting from zero

There is, however, another mistake we should avoid.

It would be wrong to describe Africa simply as a passive victim of a new technological order.

That would reproduce another familiar and limiting narrative about the continent.

Ancient African civilisations predated many later Western civilisations.

Africa has embedded in its history extraordinary traditions of innovation, knowledge, skills and know-how.

Africa has been there before.

And Africa is building.

African universities are producing researchers.

African entrepreneurs are developing technology companies.

Governments are developing national and continental AI strategies.

Digital public infrastructure is expanding.

Data centres are being built.

Mobile money has demonstrated that African societies can leapfrog conventional technological pathways.

The African Continental Free Trade Area creates the possibility of a continental market on a scale that individual African states cannot achieve on their own.

There is talent.

There is capital.

There is ambition.

There is creativity.

What remains uneven is the scale at which these assets can be organised into enduring technological capability.

That is an institutional problem.

And institutional problems require institutional responses.

But institutional responses do not begin with institutions.

They begin with a decision about what kind of economic power Africa wants to possess.

That is the question beneath the question.

The continent cannot build the future as 55 markets

This is where African integration becomes more than a political slogan.

There are things that individual African countries can do.

There are also things that make little economic sense to attempt 55 times.

Advanced computing infrastructure is one.

Research ecosystems are another.

Specialised skills are another.

Standards are another.

Digital markets are another.

Negotiating with the world's largest technology companies is another.

A small African economy negotiating alone with a multinational technology company possessing vastly greater financial, technical and legal resources is not negotiating from the same position as a continent representing more than 1.3 billion people.

Scale changes bargaining power.

Integration changes scale.

The African Continental Free Trade Area is therefore about much more than removing tariffs.

It is about creating the possibility of a continental market of sufficient scale to allow African enterprises to grow beyond the limitations of fragmented national markets.

This matters enormously in the technological economy.

A continental market can create demand at scale.

It can support regional value chains.

It can strengthen the bargaining position of African governments.

It can make investment in infrastructure more commercially viable.

And it can give African enterprises a larger platform from which to compete globally.

But the existence of a continental market does not, by itself, create continental productive capacity.

The market must be used to build it.

That is the distinction.

Africa cannot simply create a larger market in which other people's technologies are consumed.

It must use the scale of that market to create African technologies, African companies, African intellectual property and African value chains.

Scale changes bargaining power.

But only if we organise it.

Integration creates scale.

But only if we build with it.

The AfCFTA is effective if we are intentional about it.

This is one of the reasons African integration must increasingly be understood as an economic and technological project, not merely a diplomatic one.

The question is no longer only whether Africans can travel more easily across borders.

It is whether African businesses can scale across borders.

Whether African researchers can collaborate across borders.

Whether African data can be governed through coherent frameworks.

Whether African digital markets can operate at continental scale.

Whether African capital can finance African companies as they grow.

Whether African states can negotiate collectively where collective bargaining produces better outcomes.

Pan-Africanism, if it is to remain relevant to the twenty-first century, must therefore become practical.

It must build things.

The university is part of the infrastructure

There is another lesson that should not be lost in the excitement around AI.

Technology cannot substitute for institutions that produce knowledge.

A continent cannot purchase its way into technological sovereignty.

It can buy equipment.

It can buy software.

It can lease cloud capacity.

It can import expertise.

But it cannot permanently import the intellectual capacity required to determine its technological future.

That capacity has to be built.

Universities therefore matter.

Research institutions matter.

Research and Development investment matters.

Doctoral programmes matter.

Science funding matters.

Intellectual property regimes matter.

Libraries matter.

Archives matter.

And the ability to retain African researchers matters.

This is not separate from artificial intelligence.

It is the foundation beneath it.

AI is ultimately built on knowledge.

The countries that dominate the AI economy are not merely those with computers.

They are countries with universities, laboratories, companies, venture capital, engineers, mathematicians, researchers, datasets and institutions capable of sustaining innovation.

We should therefore be careful about celebrating AI adoption while neglecting the institutions that produce the people who will build the next generation of AI.

New technologies demand new skill sets, both to maintain them and to compensate for the old jobs that will be decimated by those technologies.

African universities have a lot to do.

A continent cannot become a technological power by becoming a better consumer of technology.

It becomes one by becoming a producer of knowledge.

And knowledge, if it is not converted into productive capacity, remains knowledge without power.

The question of capital

There is another piece of the puzzle.

Talent without capital is not enough.

Africa has produced entrepreneurs capable of building companies that solve real problems.

But building a company and building a globally competitive technology company are not the same thing.

Scale requires capital.

Long-term research requires capital.

Computing requires capital.

Data centres require capital.

Manufacturing requires capital.

University research requires capital.

And capital does not simply follow talent.

It follows risk, expected returns, networks, institutions and markets.

This is why the question of African ownership cannot be reduced to encouraging more startups.

We need to ask who finances them.

Who owns them after they scale.

Where the intellectual property resides.

Where the profits accumulate.

Who sits on the boards.

Who controls strategic decisions.

And whether successful African companies remain African-owned when they become globally significant.

This is not an argument for African capital to replace foreign capital.

Africa needs foreign capital.

It needs global partnerships.

It needs international markets.

But it needs to enter those relationships with assets of its own.

Africa also needs to develop its own capital.

It needs to depend more on resources it has accumulated itself, including workers' pension funds and other pools of indigenous capital.

No country ever developed using another's capital alone.

Capital might owe allegiance to no geographical location, but it is loyal to its home country and views elsewhere as a source of accumulation.

The objective cannot simply be to attract more capital.

It must be to build indigenous capital and use it to build things that increase the capacity to generate more value from within Africa.

That is how ownership compounds.

That is how capacity compounds.

That is how power compounds.

From access to capability

Perhaps this is the distinction that should define the next phase of Africa's digital journey.

We have spent years asking whether Africans have access.

We now need to ask whether Africans have capability.

Access asks whether you can use the technology.

Capability asks whether you can build it.

Access asks whether you can connect to the cloud.

Capability asks whether you can build the infrastructure beneath it.

Access asks whether you can use an AI model.

Capability asks whether you can train, adapt, govern and improve one.

Access asks whether your language is supported.

Capability asks whether you possess the linguistic data, research and technical expertise to ensure that your language is properly represented.

Access is necessary.

But capability determines agency.

And agency determines whether participation becomes power.

This is why the question of compute matters.

Not because Africa must reproduce Silicon Valley.

It does not.

But because advanced computing capacity increasingly sits beneath scientific research, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, financial services and other strategic sectors.

A continent that has no meaningful control over computing capacity will find it difficult to control the technologies that depend upon it.

The same is true of data.

The same is true of knowledge.

The same is true of capital.

The same is true of institutions.

These are not five unrelated policy priorities.

They are five parts of the same question:

Does Africa possess the capacity to determine its own technological and economic future?

What would Durban ask of us now?

This is perhaps the question we should have been asking all along.

If Durban forced the world to confront the historical structures of racial inequality, what should its legacy require of us in 2026?

I do not think the answer is another declaration.

There have been enough declarations.

The question is whether we are prepared to build.

Build the capital.

Build the infrastructure.

Build the research institutions.

Build the skills.

Build the capital markets.

Build the companies.

Build the regulatory capacity.

Build continental markets.

Build the intellectual property.

Build the data governance systems.

Build the computing capacity.

Build the institutions that allow African knowledge to become African productive power.

But there is something deeper.

We need to decide what we mean by development.

If development means that Africans become better consumers of products and services created elsewhere, then we may celebrate rising incomes while remaining structurally dependent, or nominally independent.

If development means that Africans acquire the capacity to create, own and determine the systems through which economic value is produced, then the ambition is different.

It is larger.

And it is harder.

This does not mean rejecting partnerships with the rest of the world.

Quite the opposite.

Africa needs partnerships.

It needs investment.

It needs access to global markets.

It needs scientific collaboration.

It needs technology transfers.

But partnership is strongest when both sides possess something of value.

Dependency begins when one side possesses the infrastructure and the other possesses primarily the market.

Africa cannot continue being the global beggar of aid and donor funding.

It is time to change the narrative.

The next 25 years

Twenty-five years after Durban, it would be easy to conclude that the world failed.

That would be too simple.

The world did change.

Political apartheid ended in South Africa.

The international language around racism changed.

The historical relationship between slavery, colonialism and contemporary inequality became more difficult to dismiss.

Africa's political voice became stronger in important international institutions.

Digital technology opened opportunities that previous generations could not have imagined.

A new generation of Africans is more connected to the rest of the continent and the world than ever before.

But history does not move in a straight line.

Progress in one dimension can coexist with dependence in another.

Political inclusion can coexist with economic exclusion.

Digital access can coexist with technological dependence.

Educational expansion can coexist with weak research capacity.

Economic growth can coexist with limited ownership.

And a continent can be described as "rising" while still struggling to determine the terms on which it rises.

That is why the next twenty-five years matter.

The question before Africa is not whether artificial intelligence will arrive.

It already has.

The question is whether Africa will merely adopt technologies developed elsewhere, or whether it will develop the capacity to influence what those technologies become.

Whether African languages will merely be translated by machines, or whether African researchers will help build the systems that understand them.

Whether African data will merely feed global systems, or whether African institutions will determine how that data creates value.

Whether African consumers will merely enlarge somebody else's market, or whether African companies will own meaningful portions of the value chains serving those consumers.

Whether our brightest young people will remain users of technology, or become its architects.

Whether African governments will merely regulate technologies created elsewhere, or possess enough technical knowledge to shape the rules under which those technologies operate.

Whether African universities will merely teach students to use the technologies of the future, or become places where those technologies are imagined, researched and built.

Whether African capital will merely finance consumption, or finance production.

Whether African integration will remain an aspiration, or become an instrument for building scale.

These are not technical questions.

They are questions of economic power.

And therefore they are questions of political economy.

The inequality we have not yet named

This brings us back to Durban.

And, ultimately, to Du Bois.

The problem of the twentieth century was the colour line.

Durban represented one of the great international efforts to confront the historical and institutional consequences of that line.

But the twenty-first century has not abolished inequality.

It has changed some of the mechanisms through which inequality is produced and reproduced.

Inequality does not always announce itself in the language of race.

Sometimes it appears in the ownership of land.

Sometimes in access to capital.

Sometimes in who controls knowledge.

Sometimes in whose history is preserved.

Sometimes in who writes the rules.

And increasingly, it may appear in who owns the technological systems through which knowledge, commerce and economic value are produced.

The next inequality will not necessarily look like the last one.

That is precisely why we need to recognise it.

The danger is not that technology will make Africa less connected.

The danger is that Africa may become more connected while remaining structurally dependent.

The danger is not that Africans will be excluded from the AI economy.

The danger is that we may be included primarily as users, consumers, sources of data and suppliers of talent, while the deepest layers of ownership remain elsewhere.

That is a different kind of inequality.

It is an inequality of capability.

An inequality of ownership.

An inequality of capital.

An inequality of technological power.

And if we do not recognise it now, we may spend another generation trying to dismantle it.

The choice before Africa is therefore not between isolation and integration.

It is not between foreign investment and African ownership.

It is not between technology and sovereignty.

It is not between globalisation and self-determination.

The real challenge is to build the capacity to participate in the global economy without surrendering the capacity to shape it.

That is the work of the next twenty-five years.

It is not enough to be connected.

It is not enough to participate.

It is not enough to rise.

Africa must build.

It must own.

It must know.

It must decide.

Because the ultimate question of the next twenty-five years will not be whether Africa was invited into the world's new technological economy.

It will be a much harder question.

What did Africa own when it arrived?

The digital future of Africa is not an accident