Africa needs sustainable digitalisation: The link between disruptive tech, inequality, and environmental sustainability

We live in a digital age where many social, economic, institutional and political activities are dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs). Accelerated digitalisation is often heralded as a panacea for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Africa’s Agenda 2063. However, the process is not automatic, too often the opportunities of digitalisation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in Africa are inflated, while the current and impending risks are undermined.

This techno-deterministic optimism, based on generating knowledge-driven economic growth, productive efficiency and (often privately funded) social overhead capital (SOC), fails to fully capture the dark side of the digital economy. Some of these adverse features include the digital inequality paradox, rising environmental threats, the inherent global “winner takes all” nature of the digital economy and the emergence of data-driven value creation, to name a few. The last two characteristics both highlight the borderless global nature of the digital economy, currently shaped by an uneven international ICT landscape that threatens to perpetuate power and prosperity imbalances between hyper-digitalised and under-connected regions — driven by ownership of ICT infrastructure, global supply chains, new technological innovations, and data.

What are the current challenges for Africa?

Multi-dimensional structural economic defects dampen sustainable digital transformation

By 2050, Africa is projected to have the fastest urban growth. From a development policy perspective, rapid urbanisation and population growth compound the challenges of multifaceted inequality, unemployment, poverty, and environmental degradation that confront the region.

Current digitalisation trajectories, which are largely spurred by adoption of internet enabled mobile devices in Africa tend to perpetuate existing inequalities. They are neither sustainable nor equitable and exacerbate the complex, social, political, institutional, spatial, economic and developmental factors already at play on the Continent. Structural economic deficiencies are arguably amplified, as the economic and social value of being digitally networked increases exponentially.

Fragilities that already plague the continent will no doubt be worsened if countries continue to design and implement approaches to digital transformation and datafication (which have cross-cutting policy implications) with incoherent siloed approaches. As the continent with the majority of late technology adopters, many African countries lack the critical mass required to reap productivity gains from data-driven digitalisation. This is exacerbated by unstable electricity supply, inadequate ICT infrastructure, and weak foundational digital ecosystems.

Other confounding factors associated with increased demand for internet enabled mobile devices are unethical mining labour practices, threats of rising e-waste, increased electricity consumption and energy demands, and little to no mineral beneficiation from demand for rare earth minerals that are used in the global technology sector production value chains .

While Africa produces the least global e-waste, rising digitalisation, hyper-urbanisation, and the lack of appropriate infrastructure and regulation to manage e-waste at scale, compound the complexities of addressing cross-cutting sustainable digital transformation policy challenges in African countries. For instance, increased digitalisation and the use of disruptive data-driven technologies such as artificial intelligience (AI) can also create negative externalities that contribute to climate change, environmental degradation, and human rights violations.

What are the opportunities?

Public policy experimentation, strategic planning, and foresight can build more a more equitable tech-driven future

The COVID-19 pandemic emphasised that addressing digital inequality isn’t a technology problem. It’s a classic development challenge. It’s become abundantly clear that offline education, gender, income, public service delivery and spatial inequalities are simply mirrored online.

A commitment to an experimental, comprehensive approach to policy design through forward-looking policies that are fit-for-purpose, contextually relevant, and facilitate greater cooperation across seemingly unrelated policy areas such as reducing inequality and promoting environmental sustainability can facilitate a more equitable tech driven future. Sadly, these mutually reinforcing policy areas are often addressed through siloed policy interventions.

In addition, trans-geographical coordinated action and acknowledging the interlinkages between the most pressing developmental challenges of our time, need to be carefully considered in public policy design. This is crucial to secure equitable wealth creation, poverty reduction, and environmental protection — all necessary elements required to attain all-inclusive human prosperity needed to achieve the SDGs.

While technological innovation and digitalisation has the potential to boost the SDGs on the Continent, strategic planning, anticipatory governance, and foresight are needed to design policies and regulation that are dynamic, sustainable, equitable and contextually relevant to different groups of people in order to reap the benefits of data-driven digital transformation.

The SDGs are intended to tackle the most important challenges of our times through transversal policy solutions. Focusing only on economic growth is not sufficient to reduce poverty and encourage shared prosperity. African countries should adopt a ‘Sustainable Digitalisation’ approach, that raises considerations for interdependent factors and elevates the discourse on the socio-ecological impacts of digital transformation and datafication in Africa.

To ensure digital transformation and the increasing datafication of socio-economic activity does not worsen vulnerabilities within and among nations, Africa needs progressive, holistic approaches for shaping the digital economy based on the three dimensions of sustainable development, which are environmental stewardship, inclusive social enhancement, and equitable economic progress.

An overhaul of political, economic, institutional and social systems is required to capture the global, regional, and local dynamics of the data-driven digital economy and its associated disruptions in a way that ensures technological disruptions build future resilience and benefit everyone on the continent — including the environment.

This blog has been revised and was first published here in 2020