All the robots we’ll never fear

Who has decent work these days? Is it the cleaner at a luxury condo in Abidjan, taking night classes to become a medical assistant? Her monthly salary covers tuition and places her in the country’s middle class – but is likely to plummet once she switches careers, if her patients are not rich like the expats she currently serves.

Is it the cocoa farmer in Tafo, supplying beans and butter to a fair-trade chocolate company? He may be paid above market rates for his products – but has little say in setting those rates, famously controlled by traders in London and New York. He’s also unlikely to be earning a living wage.

How about the team of university graduates in Kampala, out to launch a clean energy startup? By the time they manage to register their company and find power reliable enough to complete a funding pitch, a good six months may have passed. If they don’t already come from money, attracting it might prove exhaustive in itself.

African youth in their prime earning years are healthier, better educated, and more connected than ever. They have come of age amidst galloping economic growth which, though abated, continues to outpace that of other regions. Yet they share with young people worldwide a frustration with the options at hand, an impatience with outmoded systems, and a profound distrust of the institutions that uphold them.

Their anxiety is not misplaced. Behind the glittering figures, African economies reflect the global paradoxes of growth fueling rising inequality, and unsteady work reducing unemployment. The gig economy, in which many young graduates around the world feel stuck, has thickened the tallow between the vast informal sector that employs most people and the stability of well-paying, fulfilling formal jobs. A recent Afrobarometer survey revealed that of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the highest priority for Africans is “decent work and economic growth”.

Despite its convergence with some worrisome trends, however, the continent stands apart in one critical area: industrialization. Decades of touting Africa as the next industrial boom have failed to move the continent much beyond the starting blocks. Limited infrastructure, high operating costs, and a dearth of processing capacity have stalled its journey along the manufacturing paths to prosperity once taken by Asia and the Americas.

But whereas those regions now find themselves grappling with the onslaught of automation and its dire implications for worker displacement, most Africans need not fear the army of robots who won’t be replacing them at factories that were never built.

Instead, as with the mobile phone revolution, which saw the continent vault over laggard landline infrastructure to lead the world in handset access and mobile banking, Africa has an opportunity to imagine future possibilities untethered to the past.

Ethiopia, for instance, is aiming to achieve growth through industrialization that is both environmentally sustainable and socially transformative. It is admittedly a hard balance to perfect. The country’s industrial parks may attract major Western brands like apparel makers Gap and H&M, both of which have committed to more sustainable business practices. But opportunities for high-skills training have so far been limited, and Ethiopia’s garment workers are among the lowest paid in the world. For a new government facing a job market that adds two million restless and ambitious young people each year, robots will be a nonstarter.

Africa must take the lead in rethinking industrialization in the light of overall gains in health, wealth and longevity. With more people around to consume goods and services delivered by shrinking workforces on stagnant or declining wages, African governments must set and enforce new standards of corporate performance that prioritize worker security and well-being.

They must use their leverage in global trade negotiations to push for terms more favorable to the commodity producers that keep them in office. The recent tide-turning success of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana in setting the price at which giants such as American chocolatier Mars must buy their cocoa shows the way forward for commodity producers with major market share.

And what of an Africa beyond industrialization? As richer regions confront an uncertain future, what can African leaders do to make their citizens better navigators of an ever-changing world?

Continued improvements to health care, education and public services are a start. But the time has come for African countries to take a stand on proposals like universal basic income. The idea is back in vogue, with debate raging in the United States, a pilot scheme recently concluded in Finland, and a multi-year program under way in Kenya.

Could universal basic income help steady the ground to launch young Africans toward their rising ambitions? And if so, where would the money come from? One possibility might be in stanching the $50 billion that the continent loses each year in illicit financial outflows to corruption and tax avoidance schemes. Hope is that this generation – voluble, tech-savvy, more jaded and implacable than their parents – will be the one to finally bend political will to popular demand to shore up leaky public coffers.

Rising African countries, nearing a cliff-edge over which others are starting to fall, have everything to gain by creating new bridges to a more sustainable future.