03 · Setting the scene
The world is changing.
We are living through the unfolding of a new economic era — one in which technology, industrial capacity, energy and resources are being reorganised at the same time.
Three forces are doing most of the work. They are usually discussed separately. Understood together, they explain why the location of production, resources and people is becoming a strategic question rather than a commercial one.
The three forces
Computation has become strategic infrastructure. The capacity to design and fabricate semiconductors, and to power the data centres that run on them, now shapes national economic standing.
The materials and the electricity that this depends on are not evenly distributed — and a significant share of both sits on the African continent.
Businesses and governments are increasingly reconsidering where productive capacity should be located and how resilient supply chains need to be.
The result is a search for new places to build — with labour, land, resources, energy and access to growing markets. Few regions can offer all five.
Industrialisation, urbanisation and digitalisation all require substantially greater energy supply, and the technologies that deliver it require minerals in volumes the world has not previously needed.
The question is no longer only where these minerals are found, but where they are processed, and who captures the value of doing so.
The fourth force
There is a fourth force. It is not a technology or a policy. It is a continent of more than a billion people whose population, resources and productive capacity will shape the second half of this century.
The case for Africa