On Leapfrogging: What are we leaping over, and where are we landing?

About The AuthorUche Ezejiofor is a Nigerian researcher and strategist working across political economy and Africa's digital economy, with a focus on digital sovereignty, governance, and colonial inheritance in the systems shaping the continent's technological future. She draws on Pan-African studies and Black/African feminist theory to turn rigorous scholarship into policy-relevant analysis for practitioners and institutions. She holds a Master's in Pan-African Studies from Syracuse University, an Affiliate Researcher post at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, and co-founds Nzonzi, a research communications agency dedicated to knowledge equity for African and diaspora scholars.Following my attendance at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton African Business Forum last year, I left with a number of insights and questions on the power of innovation as a tool to solve so many problems across the African continent. Namely, I was most entranced by a Venture Capital investor based in South Africa who spotlighted a startup that he just invested in. The startup is a drone logistics company that operates in rural Rwanda to serve smallholder farmers that have no internet and low mobile connectivity. Essentially, a farmer only needs a basic phone and a USSD code to request a drone to pick-up their harvested crops for sale and distribution. As a result, the timeline between when a farmer harvests their crops and when those crops are sold for export, collapses all without having to rely on the internet. This level of creative problem solving in the face of constrained resources and non-existent infrastructure is inherent to many of the tech-driven innovations across the continent. But throughout the investor’s speech, I could only think of one question: Why does this farmer have no connectivity in the first place?

In 2024 the International Fund for Agricultural Development estimated that over seventy percent of Africa’s food supply comes from approximately 33 million smallholder farms, yet there are no substantial local, regional, national, or continental mandates that require connectivity infrastructure to support these rural farmers. At first glance, the drone logistics startup is a genuinely innovative approach, but it is ultimately a privatized solution to a large-scale public failure. This startup is attempting to patch an infrastructural gap that the state was intended to fill. This instance of “leapfrogging” over foundational governance infrastructure in favor of a private tech solution, limits the state’s capacity to genuinely serve its citizens. This leap from no internet connectivity in rural Rwanda to drone harvest pickup does not holistically solve the infrastructure problem at hand. Instead, it reassigns who is responsible for solving it. So, in the name of innovation for the African continent, what are we leaping over? And where are we landing after we leap?

Understanding Leapfrogging in Practice

The Institute for Security Studies and African Futures defines leapfrogging as a well-established phenomenon where technological innovation creates unthinkable shifts in productivity. More specifically, they state that “development leapfrogging refers to a country's––particularly a developing economy's, ability to skip intermediate stages of technological and industrial development and move directly to more advanced systems.” Further, once this innovation is copied by others, it allows them to discard older and foundational forms of the technology in order to fully adopt the new development. In the context of the African continent-– where this practice is rampant–– leapfrogging is the practice of African countries skipping over foundational and technological infrastructure to instead, adopt new digital versions of them. This is most evident in the ways that many African countries skipped having landline phones in their homes entirely, and instead relied upon mobile phones. Similarly, instead of building the slow infrastructure that wealthier countries built over decades like roads, banking branches, and postal systems, many African countries have adopted digital platforms that seem to do the same job faster and cheaper. The appeal of this process for African countries lies in the ability to catch up to later stages of development without the financial and governmental cost. As a result, the African Union, the World Bank, and many other international institutions have cited many opportunities for the African continent to develop, primarily through leapfrogging.

Leapfrogging has been a successful development strategy for a number of countries and industries across the continent. Namely, M-Pesa in Kenya provided millions of unbanked people access to financial services without any physical bank branches. In the same way, MTN provided mobile connectivity without relying upon traditional telecommunications infrastructure. These iterations of leapfrogging work well and have successfully supplemented key infrastructure across the continent and worldwide, especially when considering that mobile banking was adopted in Europe and the US following the creation of M-Pesa. But, concerns should be raised when we treat these kinds of “solutions” as a substitute for the state. Especially considering that M-Pesa still relies upon digital infrastructure that emerges from the Global North.

While the African Union’s current Digital Transformation Strategy states that the lack of legacy infrastructures makes adopting digitized options a perfect leapfrogging opportunity, the World Bank argues that it is time to "go back to basics, think big, and foster the environment for more innovation and technology adoption." Ultimately, these international institutions frame Africa’s infrastructural constraints - such as gaps in skills, public service delivery, finance, and energy - as investment opportunities to bolster the private sector of various African countries. But this argument positions governance failure as a market opportunity and this is how one ends up with a drone company solving connectivity problems that a government mandate could have addressed. It also produces a form of public servants and government employees that are primarily trained to manage investor contracts, procurement relationships, and public-private partnerships thereby, not equipped to deliver public services or build institutional capacity. In turn, the African state only gets weaker.

The State We Are Leaping Over

This orientation toward private sector tech-driven solutions is not new. In fact, they are actually just contemporary manifestations of neoliberalism on the African continent, where the logic that propelled Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) in the 1980s are now just rebranded as innovation ecosystems. While SAPS told African states that their public institutions have failed and that privatized solutions are the only answer, international institutions’ reliance upon leapfrogging theory communicates the same underlying message of privatized solutions to public failures. And while over $4 billion of venture capital has been invested in African tech startups in 2025 alone, venture capital deployment does not build governing capacity for African countries. Also considering that many African states are experiencing questionable periods of political regression through coups, and declines of fair and free elections, leapfrogging could potentially accelerate this regression while framing it as progress.

Samir Amin’s “Unequal Development” describes the state as “an expression of relations in a society” and the mechanism that creates economic unity, legitimizes social forms, establishes currency for trade, and develops legal institutions. According to Amin's understanding of the state as detailed in his text, Unequal Development, peripheral formations are structurally shaped to serve the needs of external capital, not internal development. In other words, when African states are forcibly integrated into the world market through external investments into the African continent, the state mechanism to manage internal development is weakened. When we leapfrog foundational governance infrastructure, we are not skipping a phase. We are skipping the mechanism through which a state becomes capable of serving its own people. We are leaping over self-sufficient and resilient governing structures and landing in a politically atrophied and hyper privatized African state.

The Trap That We Land In

If we rely solely upon leapfrogging and privatized solutions to develop the African continent, we will ultimately arrive in countries that look innovative and futuristic, but govern poorly. We will produce a generation of public servants and government workers that manage contracts with private companies instead of delivering roads, hospitals, schools, and connectivity. We will forcibly create dependency on platforms and digital tools that are owned by foreign investors and replicate historical patterns of dependency on foreign loans, and development investments. If African countries continue on the leapfrogging trajectory prescribed by international institutions, African countries will ultimately leap away from ever needing to build a functioning state mechanism.

Africa's resource constraints genuinely breed ingenious and innovative solutions that have allowed private companies and startups to produce real value for real people. None of that is in dispute. But, public sector responsibility for service delivery is non-negotiable in Africa's development. Private innovation cannot (and should not) shoulder that burden alone. The drone company in Rwanda is not the problem. The absence of a government mandate for rural connectivity is the problem. Leapfrogging solves one symptom of a much more robust disease. Despite productive digitization and tech innovations, we cannot celebrate the leap without asking what we left behind and who will still be standing there when the foreign venture capital money runs out.