Spotlight
Uchechi Joy Onyenwe | 9 min read | Apr 13, 2026
Why AI Readiness for West African Civil Society Cannot Be Leapfrogged
When mobile money transformed financial inclusion across West Africa in the 2000s and 2010s, it appeared to validate the idea that developing regions could bypass costly and slow-moving institutional infrastructure to adopt emerging technologies directly. Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal did not need to build extensive branch banking networks before their populations could transact digitally. The mobile phone, it seemed, was sufficient. This is the logic of leapfrogging; skipping generations of technology to land directly at the frontier.
