Introduction

We are now entering a new era of socio-economic disruption arising from the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) – which is characterized by the amalgamation of the digital, biological and physical realms (Ndung’u and Signé 2020). A key question on the African agenda is how Africa can leverage 4IR for its benefit and not miss out this time around. This chapter deals with this question and explores some of the crucial cross-cutting issues surrounding the topic of 4IR in the African context. This work is intended to serve as a high-level African perspective of the fourth industrial revolution that will assist scholars, policy-makers, researchers, governments, business and other stakeholders in their respective roles in taking Africa forward.

Technologies of the 4IR are perhaps not a far-off vision for Africa (AfDB 2019), and are already playing a pivotal role as Africa transitions into the mainstream global economy. There are ongoing developments across the continent with recent expansions by tech giants such as Netflix, Facebook, Google and so on into Africa, and the rapid growth of tech start-ups and other such exciting developments in Africa's emerging technology landscape (Bright 2016). It has become clear that industries and governments must invest in and leverage 4IR technologies to make gains in the modern-day global economy (Marwala 2019). Although there has been some positive movement on the continent, with improved human development indices, and better regional interactions and economic progress, there are very deep concerns about the continent potentially missing out on reaping the growth benefits of 4IR due to the lack of human capacity development, adequate infrastructure and coherent leadership (Mead 2017; Radu 2020). These major thematic areas, that is, infrastructure, human capacity development and policy are explored in this chapter in the context of Africa's preparedness for 4IR. Taking into account that Africa is a vast and diverse continent, a high-level analysis of these issues is carried out with emphasis placed on the critical commonalities surrounding these issues as they pertain to Africa's 54 countries. This reveals some of the major challenges and opportunities relating to the aforementioned transition.

This chapter is organized as follows.