Tech Safari’s Pyramid of Tech

Hey there, Sheriff here 👋 

Ever wondered why, sometimes, futuristic tech seems too early for Africa?

I do. And recently, we worked out why.

That’s why this week, we’re writing about the Tech Safari’s Pyramid of Tech.

Let me know what you think about it at the end.

In Silicon Valley, tech companies are building robots that can write code and do backflips.

But in Africa, we’re still figuring out how to keep the lights on.

If the global tech race were Formula 1, Africa is still trying to invent the steering wheel.

Will Africa always be behind?

To answer that, we need to go back to high school economics.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Tech

You’ve probably seen Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs before.

It’s the pyramid that ranks the different human needs.

At the base, you have food, water, and shelter.

At the top, it’s love, purpose, and legacy.

Now, imagine that same pyramid, but for tech.

At the top of the pyramid, you have the futuristic stuff: AI, biotech, space tech, and quantum computing.

And at the bottom, you have the basics: logistics, power, payments, and internet access.

The bottom is where Africa sits

In the US, companies like Tesla and Lucid are making self-driving cars.

But in Africa, companies like Autochek are still helping people buy used cars on credit.

Africa’s tech problems are survival problems: power, food, jobs.

So naturally, most African startups build their solutions around them.

• M-PESA lets people transfer money without a bank account

• d.Light sells solar products to people on credit

• And ThriveAgric built the rails to help African farmers sell more

These are all necessary and impactful.

But by the time we fix these problems, the world might be living on Mars.

And we’d still be behind. So we have to ask…

Can we move up?

Here’s a fun fact.

Most Africans never used landlines.

Take Nigeria, for instance.

In 1999, there were only 400,000 landlines in Nigeria, which had 123 million people.

A year later, GSM licenses were issued, and companies like MTN and Econet helped Nigeria skip into the mobile age.

They built cell towers, sold SIM cards, and marketed phones for people to use them on.

Today, there are over 165 million phone lines in the country.

But can we do it again with other industries?

My guess—probably not.

See, tech is built on other foundational tech.

• Africa’s internet economy was built on telco infrastructure.

• Smartphones are built off the back of chips and factories.

• And AI is built off the back of data centers.

In Africa, tech is built on software. But the foundational infrastructure is missing.

It’s hard to do logistics right when the roads are broken.

And it’s hard to do e-commerce when people don’t have addresses.

Even the Internet (which Africa's mobile app wave is built on) is slow in Africa.

So, when startups try to build, they hit these walls and have to dig their way through.

• Kobo360 had to contend with bad roads and illiterate drivers.

• mDaaS had to build its own diagnostic centers because there aren’t many of them around.

• And Reliance Health left telemedicine to build health insurance

Looking at it this way, it’s easy to see why tech in Africa lags behind the rest of the world.

But there’s another side to the story.

Africa is a continent of consumers

In sub-Saharan Africa, mobile technology services like telco and startups make up 8% of GDP

But the whole continent contributes just 0.3% to global tech exports.

And when you take out telco and mobile apps, there isn’t much “tech” left.

We don’t make the cars we drive; we don’t make the PCs we use; and we only recently started assembling smartphones locally.

In Africa, household consumption is growing faster than GDP.

Consumption is a function of income.

But production is a function of talent.

And in Africa, talent—the kind that can produce things—is a problem.

Only 5% of African adults (in Africa) have a degree. And 75% of young people aren’t training for the jobs of the future.

That’s an entire generation that can’t give the world the goods and services it needs.

All these things add up to Africa being at the bottom—and staying there.

But what if this could all be an advantage?

The Joys of Playing at the Bottom

Sometimes, being behind can have a silver lining.

It means we get to watch other markets and learn from them.

That’s what China did.

In the 1990s, they were way behind the U.S. in tech.

Slowly, they clawed their way up with the oldest trick in the book: copying.

But they did it cheaper and faster.

And just like Travis Kalanick (Uber’s first CEO) puts it, you run out of stuff to copy at some point.

Then you start innovating.

Today, China is a leader in tech, often building better products that shock the world.

Like Deepseek, a ChatGPT rival built for 5% the cost of one ChatGPT’s models.

With massive investment in the basics (talent and infrastructure), and a healthy dose of copying, Africa can move up the pyramid.

Africa needs to get on this arc, but there’s a right way to do it.

How to copy with style

In Africa, copying gets a bad rap, and for good reason.

We’ve seen too many African startups mimic Silicon Valley startups and crash.

But maybe copying isn’t the problem.

Copying the wrong things is.

Trying to build like Silicon Valley is like copying Steph Curry when you just learned to dribble.

Instead, we should map our journey to regions similar to ours.

India. Southeast Asia. Brazil.

Markets that faced the same survival-level challenges.

And slowly climbed the pyramid.

We’re calling this Tech Safari’s Pyramid of Tech.

The biggest advantage of this? It can easily be a cheat sheet for what to build here.

And that’s because it helps us ask the right questions.

• What worked for India’s fintech boom?

• How did Southeast Asia scale logistics?

• What lessons can we learn from Brazil’s e-commerce rise?

The goal isn’t just to copy but to adapt smartly.

Instead of rushing into the wrong type of innovation, we can use other markets as a roadmap.

For instance, one of the earliest bike-hailing startups in Africa—Gokada—was almost a perfect replica of Pathao, a similar startup that had worked in Bangladesh.

And Gokada made the deathly traffic situation in Nigerian cities like Lagos beatable with safe, on-demand bikes.

When we use these markets as guides, we can avoid billion-dollar mistakes.

We can skip experiments that failed elsewhere.

And we can become net producers of tech.

What do you think about Tech Safari’s pyramid of Tech?

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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