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Small language models: Africa's leapfrog moment

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For a decade, Africa's technology story has been a leapfrog story. Mobile money let millions skip bank branches entirely and go straight to a phone-based wallet. Mobile-first internet let a generation skip desktop computers and build businesses from a single smartphone. The pattern kept repeating: a technology arrived that was lighter, cheaper, and better suited to African conditions than whatever the rest of the world had settled on, and the continent moved faster because of it, not despite starting later. Artificial intelligence is now at the same fork in the road. The dominant global narrative treats AI as synonymous with frontier large language models: enormous, expensive, cloud-dependent systems that need gigawatt-scale data centres and constant high-speed connectivity just to function. If that were the only version of AI on offer, most of Africa would be waiting years for grids to stabilise and bandwidth to catch up. But a quieter shift has been happening in AI research its...
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Educating a Continent for the Price of a Phone

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  Africa's youth are its greatest asset, but only if they are schooled. The way we have always tried to get there — more buildings, more teachers, more textbooks — cannot move fast enough or cost little enough to close the gap. There is a cheaper, faster way. The catch is that it has to be led as public infrastructure, by Africa's own institutions, rather than left to the market. Africa is about to hold the youngest workforce on the planet. By the middle of this century, close to one in three of the world's young people will be African. That fact is usually sold as a gift, the famous " demographic dividend ." It is worth being honest about the condition attached to it. A young population pays out only if those young people can read, reason and earn. If they cannot, the same demographics turn into a bill nobody can settle. So the real question is not whether Africa has the human potential. It plainly does. The question is how you get a functioning education to hu...
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The Money You Can See

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  The last piece was about capital nobody could see. This one is about capital everybody can: the branded fridges, the free delivery trucks, the billions in corporate "empowerment" poured into South Africa's taverns. And why, after all of it, the industry has endured without ever really growing. Second in a series of three. The first, The Money You Can't See , argued that immigrant traders beat local competitors on pooled, patient, invisible capital rather than on grit. This one takes the argument a step further. Walk into a licensed tavern in Soweto or KwaMashu and the money is impossible to miss. The fridge behind the counter carries a brewer's colours. The board outside, with the tavern's own name on it, sits against a branded backdrop somebody else paid for. The chairs match. The glasses match. If the timing is right, a truck in the same livery pulls up and a driver wheels in the week's stock on credit, no cash changing hands. To a customer it look...
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The Money You Can't See

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How Lebanese traders in Nigeria and Somali shopkeepers in South Africa built business empires on pooled, invisible capital, and why the "broke refugee who got lucky" story gets it exactly backwards. In 1890, a Maronite Christian named Elias Khoury stepped off a boat in Lagos carrying a suitcase of cheap beads and textiles. He had not come to conquer a market. He had come because the silk industry that sustained his village in Mount Lebanon had collapsed under Ottoman rule, and there was little left at home but famine, taxation and conscription. So he went door to door selling trinkets, what one early account called "a collection of odds and ends," and the people of Lagos gave men like him a nickname that stuck: the coral men. It is a telling little story, because almost everything an outsider would assume about it is wrong. Khoury was not wealthy. The wave of Lebanese migrants who followed him out of villages like Miziara and Jwaya were not wealthy either. They ...
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