The myth of Africa’s ‘leapfrog moment’

A seductive idea has taken hold in boardrooms, climate summits, and venture capital decks: Africa will vault over the messy stages of development that defined Europe and East Asia. No smokestacks. No sprawling factory towns. No fossil fuels. Just a clean jump into digital services, renewable energy and critical minerals, with smartphones where assembly lines once stood. The story flatters modern sensibilities. It also flatters outside investors who prefer tidy narratives to stubborn facts.
Africa does hold assets the world urgently needs. Lithium, cobalt, manganese, graphite, copper, and rare earths sit beneath its soil. Solar radiation and wind reach levels Europe can only envy. Cities such as Nairobi, Lagos, Kigali, and Accra host young coders, logistics startups, and fintech firms that would look at home in Berlin or Bangalore. Services exports already make up about a quarter of the continent’s total exports, and they have grown far faster than goods trade since the mid-2000s.
Productivity in tourism, business services, agro-processing, and ICT often exceeds that of traditional farming several times over, with job growth that in some countries rivals or even exceeds manufacturing. Manufacturing itself, by contrast, has hovered around 11 percent of the gross domestic product for more than a decade, less than half the share seen in East Asia during its takeoff.
Potential is real. The conclusion that Africa can therefore skip the hard work of building factories, power grids, transport networks, and mass employment systems is not. “Leapfrogging” works best when the old system is narrow, self-contained, and easy to replace. Landlines fit that description. Electricity systems, industrial supply chains, and urban labor markets do not. Development is not an app update.
Historically, manufacturing did the heavy lifting because it combined three features that services rarely match at scale; the ability to employ large numbers of moderately educated workers, rapid productivity gains through learning by doing, and strong links to exports that earn foreign currency. East Asia did not grow rich on code alone. It grew rich by moving hundreds of millions from farms into factories, then up the value chain. 

Africa’s future will include code and cobalt, wind farms and fintech. It will also include welding shops, cement kilns, and gas turbines.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Africa’s manufacturing share remains low for structural reasons that digital enthusiasm does not erase. Electricity is unreliable or absent for hundreds of millions of people. Transport costs within many countries exceed the cost of shipping to Europe. Ports remain congested. Firms face fragmented markets despite recent progress on continental free trade. None of these obstacles vanish because a country installs fiber-optic cables or launches a fintech incubator.
Leapfrogging advocates often reply with the mobile phone analogy. Africa skipped landlines and moved straight to smartphones. Why not skip coal plants and factories too?
Unfortunately, the analogy fails on economics. A phone is a consumer device that plugs into a global network funded largely by private capital. A power grid is a national system requiring heavy upfront investment, long planning horizons, and constant maintenance. Distributed solar panels can light homes and charge phones, but they struggle to power steel mills, fertilizer plants, refrigerated warehouses or mass transit.
Even Egypt’s vast Benban solar complex, among the largest in the world, supplies only a fraction of national demand despite covering dozens of square kilometers. Scaling such systems to industrial levels means land, transmission lines, storage facilities, and backup generation, all of which cost money that Africa often lacks.
Industrialization itself remains unfashionable in some policy circles, dismissed as dirty or old-fashioned. History offers little comfort to this view. No country has reached high income without building a substantial manufacturing base at some stage. Services grow rich on the back of industry, not instead of it. Software firms run on servers built in factories. Tourism thrives where airports, hotels, water systems, and roads already exist. Even the vaunted green economy rests on industrial inputs: turbines, batteries, cables, vehicles, and concrete.
Services-led growth, often cited as proof of leapfrogging, also depends on foundations that rarely make headlines. Business process outsourcing relies on stable electricity, data centers, and contract enforcement. Agro-processing requires cold storage, rural roads, and predictable trade rules. Studies of so-called “industries without smokestacks” show impressive productivity gains and employment elasticity higher than many manufacturing sectors. They also show that these industries flourish mainly where infrastructure and institutions already function tolerably well.
Optimism about technology further ignores the distribution of skills. Only a small share of African secondary students reach proficiency in math and science. Universities produce talented engineers, but not in numbers sufficient to anchor continent-wide transformation. Artificial intelligence may automate routine service tasks before Africa reaps its employment benefits, repeating a pattern already visible in some middle-income economies.
None of this denies Africa’s potential role in future supply chains or green industries. The continent will almost certainly supply materials for batteries, hydrogen, and renewable infrastructure. Cities will host more startups. Services exports will expand. Solar and wind will claim a growing share of new power generation. Progress will occur.
The error lies in assuming substitution rather than accumulation. New sectors add to old ones; they do not erase the need for them. Digital payments did not eliminate banks. Mobile phones did not remove the need for landlines or roads. Solar panels do not abolish the need for stable grids.
Development remains a process of layering capabilities. Power plants precede factories. Factories support urbanization. Urbanization creates markets for services. Services, in turn, raise demand for better infrastructure and skills. Trying to reorder this sequence results in disappointment.
Outside enthusiasm for leapfrogging also masks a moral hazard. Rich countries that built prosperity on coal and oil now urge poorer nations to remain virtuous and energy-poor. The request sounds noble, yet it shifts the cost of global decarbonization onto those least responsible for the problem. Africa’s emissions share is tiny. Its development gap is vast. Asking the continent to close that gap without abundant energy and mass employment is not visionary. It is unrealistic.
Talk of leapfrogging flatters donors, investors, and climate diplomats by simplifying Africa into a stage for outside hopes. Reality is less cinematic and more demanding. Development still requires boring things; power stations, vocational schools, ports, tax systems, zoning laws and factories before they produce prosperity.
Africa’s future will include code and cobalt, wind farms, and fintech. It will also include welding shops, cement kilns, and gas turbines. Expecting otherwise confuses aspiration with strategy.
Ambition is necessary. Illusion is not.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. X: @HafedAlGhwell