Technology and Innovation

Chapter Opening

In the early 2000s, a farmer in rural Kenya seeking the day's maize price had few good options. She might walk or take a minibus to the nearest market town, spend hours waiting to learn what traders were paying, and risk arriving to find that prices had already fallen or that better prices were available in a town she had not visited. Fixed telephone lines rarely reached her village; postal services were slow and unreliable; radio gave general information but not the specific, timely facts a small trader needed to negotiate well. Twenty years later, the same farmer was more likely to carry a mobile phone capable of checking commodity prices by text message, receiving payment for her crop directly into a mobile money account, borrowing small amounts of credit against her transaction history, and communicating instantly with buyers, relatives working in the city, and agricultural extension officers offering advice on planting and pest control. This transformation did not require the prior construction of millions of miles of copper telephone wire, the sequence through which telecommunication had developed in Europe and North America over a century. It arrived instead through wireless towers, satellite links, and — increasingly — undersea fiber-optic cables that reached the continent's coasts and then extended inland through microwave relays and terrestrial cable, bringing millions of Africans onto mobile and, later, mobile internet networks within the span of a single generation.

This chapter studies the technological and scientific transformation of Africa in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the spread of telecommunications and the mobile phone, the emergence of mobile money and financial technology, the growth of digital economies, startup ecosystems, and technology hubs, the expansion of scientific research and higher education, innovation in agriculture and energy, and the broader relationship between technology and social change. It considers how young Africans in particular have used new tools to build businesses, solve local problems, and participate in global conversations, while also examining the unevenness of this transformation — the gaps in electricity, internet access, digital literacy, and capital that continue to separate different regions, classes, and generations across the continent.

It matters because technology has never been separate from African history; it has always been part of it, from the ironworking traditions described in earlier chapters, to the architectural achievements of Great Zimbabwe and the manuscript culture of Timbuktu, to the agricultural and medical knowledge systems that sustained African societies for millennia. What changed in the technology boom of the twenty-first century was not that Africa suddenly acquired technology for the first time, but that a specific combination of falling hardware costs, liberalized telecommunications markets, growing urban populations, and a very large, very young population created conditions in which digital tools spread with unusual speed, often in advance of infrastructure — roads, reliable electricity, formal banking — that had underpinned earlier waves of technological change elsewhere in the world.

Much changed in this period. State telecommunications monopolies gave way to competitive private mobile networks. Fixed-line banking, which had reached only a small fraction of Africans, was outpaced within a decade by mobile money platforms that brought basic financial services to hundreds of millions of previously unbanked people. Universities and research institutions expanded, though unevenly, and African scientists began to play larger roles in fields from genomics to renewable energy. Technology hubs emerged in cities such as Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Cape Town, and Kigali, producing software companies, e-commerce platforms, and fintech firms that attracted growing amounts of international venture capital by the 2010s.

Much also continued. Access to electricity remained deeply unequal, with large populations — especially in rural areas and in some of the continent's poorest and most conflict-affected states — still lacking reliable power. Internet access, while expanding rapidly, remained more available and more affordable in cities than in the countryside, and more available to men than to women in many contexts, reflecting broader patterns of gender inequality in access to income, education, and mobility. The benefits of the technology boom were distributed unevenly among African countries as well: a handful of larger, wealthier economies with better infrastructure and larger pools of educated workers attracted a disproportionate share of investment, while many smaller or poorer states remained largely consumers rather than producers of digital technology.

The evidence historians and social scientists use to understand this period includes telecommunications regulatory records, mobile network operator data, World Bank and International Telecommunication Union statistics on connectivity and access, venture capital investment reports, government policy documents on science and technology, university enrollment and research output statistics, oral histories and journalism documenting the experiences of entrepreneurs and users, and the products and platforms themselves — the specific mobile money systems, apps, and hardware that Africans built and adopted. This evidence reveals both remarkable achievement and persistent inequality, and it connects directly to earlier chapters on colonial infrastructure, postcolonial development strategies, urbanization, and globalization, while pointing forward to the unresolved questions about Africa's economic and technological future addressed in the textbook's concluding chapter.

This chapter also connects Africa's technology story to the wider world. African entrepreneurs, engineers, and firms have not simply imported technologies designed elsewhere; they have adapted, localized, and in important cases pioneered technologies and business models — most famously mobile money — that were later studied and partly imitated in other developing regions. Understanding this history requires taking seriously both African agency and innovation and the continuing structural constraints — capital, infrastructure, and global economic power — within which that innovation has occurred.

Learning Objectives

Guiding Historical Questions

Historical Context

To understand Africa's technology boom, students should recall the state of communications and infrastructure inherited from the colonial and early postcolonial periods, discussed in earlier chapters on colonial economies and nation building. Colonial governments built telecommunications and transportation infrastructure primarily to serve administrative control and the extraction of raw materials, not to connect African populations with one another. Railways typically ran from interior mining or plantation regions to coastal ports, rather than linking African cities and regions horizontally. Telephone networks, where they existed, served colonial administrators, settlers, and a small class of African elites, and they remained heavily concentrated in capital cities and colonial administrative centers.

After independence, many African governments inherited and continued to operate state telecommunications monopolies. These monopolies were often chronically underfunded, poorly maintained, and unable to expand fixed-line telephone service much beyond the networks the colonial period had left behind. By the late 1990s, many African countries had fewer than one fixed telephone line per hundred people, and waiting lists for a phone connection in some capital cities stretched for years. This scarcity created enormous unmet demand for basic communication — a demand that mobile telephony, once it became commercially available, would satisfy with startling speed.

The 1990s and 2000s were also a period of economic liberalization across much of Africa, discussed in the chapter on economic development and globalization. Structural adjustment programs and subsequent reform efforts often required or encouraged African governments to break up state telecommunications monopolies, license private mobile network operators, and open markets to competition and foreign investment. Companies such as Vodafone, MTN, Orange, and Airtel, alongside various African-owned operators, competed to build mobile networks across the continent, driving down the cost of handsets and airtime and rapidly expanding coverage, including into rural areas that fixed-line networks had never reached.

At the same time, several other conditions converged to make possible the technology boom described in this chapter. The falling global cost of mobile handsets, driven by manufacturing economies of scale in Asia, made phones affordable to a much larger share of the African population than earlier generations of computing or telecommunications equipment had been. The construction of undersea fiber-optic cables along Africa's coasts beginning in the mid-2000s — projects such as SEACOM on the east coast and various West African cable systems — dramatically increased available international bandwidth and reduced the cost of internet connectivity, which had previously depended on expensive and limited satellite links. A very large, rapidly growing, and increasingly urban youth population, discussed in the chapter on urban Africa, provided both a market for new technologies and a pool of technically skilled young people eager to build businesses and careers around them.

Finally, African governments and regional organizations, including the African Union discussed in an earlier chapter, increasingly identified information and communication technology as a strategic priority for development, investing — with varying degrees of success — in national broadband plans, technology parks, and digital government services. International development agencies and foundations likewise poured resources into digital financial inclusion, e-government, and technology-based education and health interventions, seeing mobile and digital technology as tools that might allow African economies to bypass some of the infrastructure-heavy stages of development that earlier industrializing regions had passed through.

Chronology Preview

Major People, Groups, Institutions, and Places

Core Vocabulary Preview

The following key terms appear throughout this chapter. Students should understand each term before proceeding to the main sections.

Technology in Contemporary Africa

Technology has always been part of African history. Earlier chapters described the ironworking traditions that spread with Bantu-speaking peoples, the monumental stone architecture of Great Zimbabwe, the astronomical and mathematical knowledge embedded in various African societies, and the manuscript and printing culture of centers such as Timbuktu. What distinguishes the period this chapter examines — roughly the 1990s to the present — is the speed and scale at which digital and mobile technologies specifically have spread across the continent, and the degree to which Africans have not merely adopted these technologies but adapted and, in some notable cases, pioneered new applications of them.

It is important for students to resist two common oversimplifications when studying this period. The first is to treat Africa's technology story as simply one of catching up to technologies developed elsewhere, arriving late and imitating models built in Silicon Valley, Europe, or East Asia. While much of Africa's hardware, software platforms, and investment capital does originate outside the continent, African engineers, entrepreneurs, and users have frequently built distinctive solutions tailored to local conditions — most famously mobile money systems built around basic phones rather than smartphones, reflecting African market conditions rather than simply copying models from wealthier regions.

The second oversimplification is to treat Africa's technology boom as a uniform, continent-wide phenomenon. In reality, access to electricity, broadband internet, smartphones, digital literacy, and investment capital varies enormously between countries, between urban and rural areas within countries, and between different income groups and genders. A software engineer in Lagos or Nairobi may have access to broadband internet, reliable electricity, and international clients, while a farmer in a rural district only a few hundred kilometers away may lack reliable electricity altogether and depend on a basic mobile phone for a single, limited set of services. Understanding Africa's technology history therefore requires attention to both the genuine achievements of the period and its persistent unevenness.

This section situates the chapter's central case studies — mobile telephony, mobile money, technology hubs, scientific research, and innovation in agriculture and energy — within this broader framework: technology as a continuation of long African traditions of practical problem-solving, occurring within a specific and often constrained set of economic and infrastructural conditions inherited from the colonial and postcolonial past.

Telecommunications and Connectivity

The single most transformative technological development in recent African history has been the spread of mobile telephony. As discussed in the historical context section, most African countries entered the 1990s with extremely limited fixed-line telephone infrastructure, heavily concentrated in capital cities and serving only a small fraction of the population. The liberalization of telecommunications markets during the 1990s and 2000s allowed private mobile network operators — both African-owned companies and multinational firms such as MTN, Vodafone, Orange, and Airtel — to build competing mobile networks, often reaching areas that fixed-line service had never served.

The results were dramatic. Mobile phone subscriptions across Africa grew from a few million in the late 1990s to hundreds of millions by the 2010s, with mobile penetration in some countries approaching or exceeding one subscription per person (accounting for individuals holding multiple SIM cards). This growth occurred far more rapidly than the decades-long process by which fixed-line telephony had spread in earlier industrializing regions, leading many observers to describe Africa as having "leapfrogged" an entire stage of telecommunications infrastructure — a concept examined critically later in this chapter.

Mobile networks initially supported only voice calls and basic text messaging, using relatively simple and inexpensive handsets that did not require constant internet connectivity. This mattered enormously for adoption: because mobile money and other basic mobile services could function over simple text-messaging protocols, they did not require users to own expensive smartphones or have access to broadband internet, allowing adoption to spread even among low-income and rural populations with only basic handsets.

The expansion of mobile broadband and smartphone internet access followed a somewhat different and more uneven trajectory. The construction of undersea fiber-optic cables along Africa's coasts beginning in the mid-2000s — projects connecting East African cities to global internet infrastructure and similar projects along the West African coast — dramatically reduced the cost of international bandwidth, which had previously depended on expensive satellite links. This infrastructure enabled the growth of mobile internet and broadband services, though access to smartphones and affordable data plans remained considerably more limited than access to basic voice and text service, particularly in rural areas and among lower-income populations. By the 2020s, a majority of African mobile connections were still on basic 2G or 3G networks in many countries, even as urban centers increasingly adopted 4G and, in some cases, early 5G service.

Connectivity infrastructure also connects to questions of national sovereignty and economic development discussed in earlier chapters. Governments have debated policies on data localization (requiring that data generated within a country be stored on servers located there), taxation of mobile services and social media use, and state control over internet access during periods of political unrest — some governments have shut down internet or social media access during elections or protests, raising significant questions about the relationship between digital connectivity and political freedom that connect to the chapter on democracy and governance.

Mobile Banking and Fintech

No African technology innovation has attracted more international attention or had a more direct effect on ordinary people's lives than mobile money, and no case is more central to that story than M-Pesa, launched in Kenya in 2007 by the mobile network operator Safaricom (majority-owned at the time by Vodafone and the Kenyan government). M-Pesa allowed users to deposit cash with a network of local agents — often small shopkeepers — in exchange for electronic money stored on their mobile phone account, which they could then send to other users via text message, withdraw as cash from another agent, or use to pay for goods and services.

The significance of this innovation lay in the problem it solved. Prior to M-Pesa, most Kenyans — like most Africans across the continent — lacked access to formal banking services. Bank branches were concentrated in cities and required forms of documentation, minimum balances, and travel that excluded much of the rural and low-income population. Sending money to relatives in other parts of the country, a common need given high rates of internal migration for work, typically required physically traveling with cash, sending money informally through bus drivers or acquaintances, or using slow and expensive formal transfer services. M-Pesa allowed money to move instantly and relatively cheaply across long distances using only a basic mobile phone and a network of local agents, without requiring a traditional bank account.

Adoption in Kenya was extraordinarily rapid. Within a few years of its launch, M-Pesa had enrolled a majority of Kenya's adult population, and mobile money transactions came to represent a substantial share of Kenya's gross domestic product flowing through the platform. Economists and development researchers have studied the effects of M-Pesa extensively, finding evidence that access to mobile money reduced poverty in some households, particularly by allowing families to better manage financial shocks such as illness or crop failure by receiving support from relatives elsewhere more quickly and reliably than previous informal transfer methods allowed.

Following Kenya's example, mobile money systems spread to dozens of other African countries during the 2010s, operated by various combinations of mobile network operators, banks, and dedicated fintech companies. These systems expanded beyond basic person-to-person transfers to include bill payment, merchant payments, savings products, and — increasingly — small loans issued based on users' mobile money transaction histories, which served as a form of credit history for populations that had never had access to formal credit scoring. This expansion of "fintech" (financial technology) attracted significant international investment, as investors recognized the scale of the previously "unbanked" population that mobile financial services could reach.

Mobile money and fintech growth has not been without controversy or limitation. Transaction fees, while lower than many formal banking alternatives, still represent a meaningful cost for very low-income users. Some governments have imposed new taxes specifically on mobile money transactions, which fintech advocates argue discourage financial inclusion, while governments argue such taxes capture revenue from a rapidly growing sector that had previously operated largely outside formal taxation. Access to mobile money and related credit products has also raised concerns about over-indebtedness among lower-income borrowers taking out multiple small loans across different platforms. These debates connect to broader questions, examined throughout this chapter, about who benefits most from Africa's technology transformation and on what terms.

Digital Economies and Startups

Alongside the growth of mobile money, the 2010s and 2020s saw the emergence of broader digital economies and startup ecosystems in several major African cities. Nairobi, sometimes nicknamed "Silicon Savannah," became one of the continent's leading technology hubs, home to numerous software companies, technology incubators such as iHub, and offices of major international technology firms. Lagos developed one of Africa's largest startup ecosystems, particularly strong in fintech and e-commerce, reflecting Nigeria's large population, sizeable middle class, and deep pool of engineering talent. Cairo, Cape Town, and Kigali similarly developed significant, though smaller, technology sectors, each shaped by distinct national policy environments, talent pools, and investor interest.

These hubs produced companies addressing a wide range of local needs: e-commerce platforms adapted to markets with limited postal infrastructure and high reliance on cash payments; ride-hailing and logistics companies adapted to African traffic and delivery conditions; agricultural technology ("agtech") platforms connecting farmers with buyers, credit, and information; health technology ("healthtech") platforms extending access to medical consultation and information in areas with few doctors; and educational technology ("edtech") platforms providing remote learning content, particularly important during school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s.

International venture capital investment in African startups grew substantially over this period, though it remained heavily concentrated in a small number of countries — primarily Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa — that together attracted the large majority of total investment, while many other African countries received comparatively little venture funding. By the early 2020s, a handful of African startups, mostly in fintech, had reached "unicorn" status (private companies valued at over one billion dollars), a milestone that attracted significant international media attention as a signal of the growing scale and credibility of African technology markets, even as critics noted that such milestones remained the exception rather than the rule and that most African technology entrepreneurs continued to operate on a much smaller scale, often within the informal economy.

The growth of digital economies also depended on and interacted with broader trends in African higher education, diaspora networks, and international partnerships. Many founders of successful African startups had studied or worked abroad before returning to build companies at home, drawing on international networks, capital, and business experience — a pattern that connects to broader questions about migration and the African diaspora discussed in earlier chapters. At the same time, growing numbers of African universities began establishing incubator and entrepreneurship programs aimed at supporting locally trained talent, seeking to reduce dependence on internationally educated founders and diaspora capital alone.

Science, Research, and Higher Education

Africa's technology boom has depended on, and in turn helped to strengthen, its higher education and scientific research institutions, though this relationship remains uneven and constrained by longstanding funding and capacity challenges discussed in the chapter on health, education, and social change. University enrollment across Africa grew substantially in the postcolonial period, and especially from the 1990s onward, as governments and families increasingly viewed higher education as central to individual and national economic advancement. However, growth in enrollment often outpaced growth in funding, faculty numbers, laboratory equipment, and library resources, leading to overcrowded classrooms and limited opportunities for advanced research at many institutions.

Scientific research capacity has varied considerably across the continent. A small number of countries and institutions — including major universities in South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya — have developed relatively strong research programs in fields ranging from public health and genomics to astronomy and renewable energy, in some cases attracting significant international research partnerships and funding. South Africa, for example, became a partner in major international scientific projects such as the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project, reflecting both its scientific infrastructure and its favorable astronomical conditions. Elsewhere, research capacity remained far more limited, with many universities focused primarily on teaching rather than research due to constrained budgets and heavy teaching loads for faculty.

Efforts to build pan-African scientific and mathematical capacity, such as the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences network of postgraduate centers, sought to address these gaps by training advanced students across multiple countries and connecting them with international faculty and research networks. Regional and continental bodies, including the African Union through its science, technology, and innovation strategy, have identified investment in research and higher education as a strategic priority for the continent's long-term development, though implementation has depended heavily on individual national government commitment and funding, which has varied considerably.

A persistent challenge affecting African science and higher education has been "brain drain" — the emigration of highly trained African scientists, engineers, and medical professionals to wealthier countries offering better funding, facilities, and compensation. This pattern, which connects to earlier chapters on the African diaspora and migration, has meant that a significant share of Africa's most advanced scientific talent has worked outside the continent for much of the postcolonial period, though growing numbers of diaspora scientists and entrepreneurs have in recent decades returned to Africa or established partnerships and investments connecting their countries of origin to international research and technology networks — a phenomenon sometimes described as "brain circulation" rather than simple, one-directional brain drain.

Innovation in Agriculture and Energy

Beyond telecommunications and finance, technology and innovation have reshaped two sectors of particular importance to African economic life: agriculture and energy. Agricultural technology platforms developed across the continent during the 2010s sought to address longstanding problems facing smallholder farmers, who make up a large share of Africa's working population, as discussed in earlier chapters on farming and rural life. These platforms have used mobile phones to deliver market price information, weather forecasts, and agronomic advice; to connect farmers directly with buyers, reducing dependence on multiple layers of middlemen; and to provide access to credit and crop insurance products tailored to smallholder needs, often using mobile money infrastructure and satellite or mobile-collected data to assess and price agricultural risk.

Energy innovation has been similarly significant, particularly in addressing the large populations across the continent lacking access to reliable electricity from centralized national grids. Off-grid solar companies developed "pay-as-you-go" solar home systems, allowing households to make small, regular mobile money payments — often smaller than the cost of the kerosene, candles, or disposable batteries such households had previously relied on for lighting and phone charging — toward the eventual full ownership of a solar power unit providing basic household electricity. Mini-grid companies developed small, localized electricity generation and distribution systems serving villages or clusters of households not connected to national grids, often using solar power supplemented by battery storage.

These innovations illustrate a broader pattern examined throughout this chapter: African entrepreneurs and engineers frequently developed distinctive business models and technical solutions adapted to specifically African conditions — widespread mobile phone ownership, limited traditional banking and grid infrastructure, and large rural populations — rather than simply importing agricultural or energy technologies designed for very different contexts elsewhere. At the same time, the scale of these innovations, while significant, remained limited relative to the scale of unmet need: hundreds of millions of Africans continued to lack reliable electricity access even as off-grid solar adoption grew, and agricultural technology platforms reached only a fraction of the continent's smallholder farming population by the 2020s.

Technology and Social Change

The spread of mobile and digital technology has reshaped social life across Africa in ways that extend well beyond commerce and finance. Mobile phones have transformed family communication, particularly for the large populations of internal and international migrants discussed in the chapter on urban Africa and the African diaspora. Where earlier generations of migrants might go months or years with only occasional letters or costly, rare phone calls to communicate with family in rural areas or other countries, mobile phones and, increasingly, internet-based messaging and video calling applications allowed far more frequent, immediate contact, helping sustain family relationships and obligations across long distances of migration.

Social media platforms, accessed increasingly through mobile phones, became important spaces for civic discussion, political organizing, and cultural expression across the continent during the 2010s and 2020s. Younger Africans in particular used platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp to organize protests and social movements, share information during elections and crises, and build audiences for creative and entrepreneurial projects, a pattern connecting to the chapter on African nationalism and contemporary politics. Governments in several countries responded to this civic use of social media with efforts to restrict access, including internet or social media shutdowns during periods of political tension, elections, or protest — raising ongoing debates, examined further in this chapter's historical debate feature, about the relationship between digital connectivity and political freedom in contemporary Africa.

Technology has also reshaped gender relations and opportunities, though unevenly. Access to mobile phones and digital financial services has in some contexts expanded women's economic independence and control over household resources, particularly where mobile money allowed women to receive and control funds directly rather than through male relatives. At the same time, persistent gender gaps in mobile phone ownership, internet access, and digital literacy — reflecting broader patterns of gender inequality in income, education, and social norms discussed in the chapter on women, family, and gender in African history — meant that women in many contexts continued to have less access to and benefit from new technologies than men.

Youth, Creativity, and Enterprise

Africa's very large and rapidly growing youth population, discussed in the chapter on urban Africa, has been central to the continent's technology story, both as the primary market for new digital products and services and as the primary source of the entrepreneurial and technical talent building them. Young Africans, often facing limited formal employment opportunities relative to the number of new workers entering the labor market each year, have turned to technology-enabled entrepreneurship and the "gig economy" — freelance and platform-based work such as ride-hailing, delivery, freelance software development, and content creation — as alternatives or supplements to traditional formal employment.

Much of this activity has occurred within what economists call the informal economy — small-scale, often unregistered enterprise operating outside formal taxation and regulation, discussed in earlier chapters on colonial and postcolonial economic history. Mobile phones and digital platforms have in many cases made informal enterprise more efficient and more connected to wider markets — a street vendor might use a mobile money account to receive payment and manage savings, or a small trader might use social media to advertise goods and reach customers beyond their immediate neighborhood — without necessarily formalizing the underlying business in the eyes of tax authorities or regulators.

Digital platforms have also enabled significant growth in African creative industries, discussed further in the chapter on culture, literature, and the arts. Musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, and writers have used social media, streaming platforms, and online marketplaces to reach audiences well beyond their home countries, contributing to the growing international visibility and commercial success of African popular music, film ("Nollywood" and other national film industries), and digital content during this period.

Africa in the Digital Age

By the 2020s, Africa's relationship with digital technology had become a subject of significant international attention, discussed by economists, development agencies, and technology companies as both an opportunity and a challenge. Optimistic accounts emphasized the continent's large youth population, growing mobile and internet penetration, and demonstrated capacity for locally adapted innovation — exemplified by mobile money — as evidence that Africa could use digital technology to accelerate economic development and even "leapfrog" earlier, more infrastructure-intensive stages of industrialization that other regions had passed through.

More cautious accounts emphasized persistent and substantial gaps: in electricity access, broadband infrastructure, digital literacy, and access to capital, all of which continued to limit how broadly the benefits of the technology sector were shared across the continent's population. They also noted that much of the hardware, cloud infrastructure, and even venture capital funding underlying Africa's technology sector continued to originate outside the continent, raising questions about the degree of genuine technological and economic sovereignty involved in Africa's digital transformation, connecting to broader debates about globalization and dependency discussed in the chapter on economic development and globalization.

This chapter's central argument is that both perspectives contain important truths. Africa's technology transformation during this period represents genuine, historically significant achievement: hundreds of millions of people gained access to communication and financial services that had never been available to them before, and African entrepreneurs and engineers built globally recognized innovations, most notably mobile money. At the same time, this transformation has been uneven, concentrated in particular countries, cities, and social classes, and dependent in important ways on foreign capital, hardware, and platforms — patterns that connect Africa's digital present to longer historical patterns of global economic inequality examined throughout this textbook.

Chapter Review and Innovation Checkpoint

This chapter has examined Africa's technological and scientific transformation from the 1990s to the present: the spread of mobile telephony and mobile money, the growth of digital economies and technology hubs, the state of scientific research and higher education, innovation in agriculture and energy, and the broader social effects of new technology on family life, civic participation, and youth enterprise. Before moving to the textbook's concluding chapter on Africa's future, students should be able to explain both the achievements and the limitations of this transformation, and to evaluate critically concepts such as "leapfrogging" that are often used to describe it.

Research or Library Extension