In 2019, writing in Harvard Business Review, I made a clear argument: Africa cannot industrialize by copying China’s path because that playbook has already expired.
China’s rise was anchored on a global system where Western Europe and the United States exported manufacturing jobs in search of cheaper labor. Many assumed that as wages rose in China, those jobs would naturally migrate to Africa. But that linear transition misunderstands the changing physics of global production.
My thesis was simple: the future would not be defined by labor arbitrage, but by technological disintermediation. Instead of moving factories from China to Africa, companies in America and Europe would increasingly deploy automation, AI, and robotics to bring production closer to home. The very foundation of outsourcing, using lower-cost human labor for repetitive or entry-level work, would weaken as machines became more capable and cost-effective.
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In other words, Africa’s development challenge is not waiting for China’s rising wages to create an opportunity. The real disruption is happening elsewhere: machines are taking over the economic logic that once made outsourcing viable.
This changes everything. It means Africa must design a new playbook, one rooted not in inherited models of industrialization, but in rethinking value creation in an age where intelligence, not just labor, is the primary driver of productivity.
Good People, that article was written before the launch of ChatGPT. Read it here
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