TO: Technology policy strategists
FROM: Conrad Tucker, Ginger Matchett, Samantha Wong, and Peter Engelke
DATE: May 1, 2026
SUBJECT: Developing an Africa-focused technology agenda for the United States to outcompete China
In December 2025, the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and Global China Hub hosted a virtual, private workshop to discuss the competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) across African tech ecosystems. The workshop brought together high-level policymakers, industry leaders, and academics from the United States and countries across Africa. The discussion evaluated the past and current state of African nations’ relationships with the United States and the PRC and addressed how they can navigate the competition between the two major powers to ensure that their communities and economies best utilize cutting-edge technologies. The workshop’s core questions were: How can the United States outcompete the PRC in markets across Africa? How can African countries leverage US emerging technologies and tech-based services to achieve their development, economic competitiveness, and social mobility gains?
This memo offers recommendations, drawn from insights gathered during the workshop, to enable both the United States and African countries to jointly build productive and value-added relationships centered on technological integration and innovation.
Strategic context
Africa is at a pivotal juncture as it navigates partnerships and strategic engagements in a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment. The United States and the PRC are also, as both seek to influence governments across the world to their geopolitical and geoeconomic advantage, and by extension to win market share abroad. Their competition extends to Africa. Whichever power succeeds in capturing the upper hand in this competition will be best positioned to partner and engage with Africa, one of the world’s fastest-growing regions.
For too long, Africa has been subject to top-down initiatives with non-African partners, wherein agreements were infrequently co-created with African leaders and decision-makers. When local perspectives are co-designed into business decisions, foreign technology firms are better positioned to understand local consumer needs and more capable of effectively marketing their products. For example, the Chinese telecommunications company Transsion Holdings has become the major player in the African phone market, holding 48 percent of the market in 2025, in part because it has tailored its products for African consumers, ensuring that its phones have longer battery life (addressing concerns about unreliable power grids), having ports for dual SIM cards (enabling consumers to mix data plans and utilize phones across different regions and countries), and more. Transsion’s success in African markets offers a critical lesson for foreign companies: Responsiveness to local technical capabilities can offer tremendous growth opportunities.
Africa has the fastest-growing population in the world, with an average age of less than twenty years. Young, innovative, and digitally focused, over 20 percent of working-age Africans becoming entrepreneurs. With a total population projected to exceed 2.5 billion by 2050, Africa’s market provides both the technology sector in the United States and the US government with an enormous opportunity to form long-term strategic partnerships with African nations that are economically and geopolitically mutually beneficial.
Technology ecosystems in Africa are surging. Tech hubs across the continent, ranging from South Africa and Kenya to Egypt and Nigeria, have been attracting investment capital for years. Emerging technologies in fintech, artificial intelligence (AI), and other arenas have kick-started new waves of interest and investment in tech-centric innovation within Africa. For instance, Kenya is considered a success in the fintech sector, having been a pioneer in mobile digital payment systems starting with Safaricom’s M-Pesa, launched in 2007. By 2025, some 91 percent of Kenyans utilized mobile money payment systems, with 47.7 million active subscribers across providers. By 2028, it is estimated that the country’s digital payments market will be valued at $14.5 billion. M-Pesa’s robust growth within Kenya and beyond results from Safaricom’s granular understanding of local markets compared with foreign mobile-service providers.
AI, likewise, provides the United States with significant opportunities to establish long-term partnerships within Africa. As a global leader in AI, the United States has the capacity to scale up its deployment of AI tools to support workforce upskilling and advance development priorities across the continent.
Policy implications
Technologies like AI can be considered a stack of systems and people working together. The pipeline includes the devices that are used to collect data (e.g., mobile phones), the networks used to transmit this data (e.g., telecommunication operators), the hardware used to store this data (e.g., AI data centers), the people and experts who label this data, the algorithms that are used to create AI models, and finally the users that leverage the benefits of these AI models for their everyday lives. Existing across this stack are government policies and decisions about how technology is used, where technology is procured from, and who controls the technology, among other issues.
When the PRC or the United States decides on a policy, for example by placing an embargo on one piece of this technology stack, there are significant consequences for both African economies, the PRC, and the United States. One key consequence is that African countries are forced to navigate competing technological and political pressures and these consequences may or may not be foreseen by policymakers in Washington and Beijing. In the early 2020s, for example, the United States encouraged Kenya to abandon Huawei as a 5G supplier, arguing that Huawei’s closeness to the Chinese state was a security risk for Kenya. The problem was that Huawei offered Kenya a lower-cost system compared with those from US allies including South Korea, Sweden, and Finland. Joseph Mucheru, at the time Kenya’s telecom minister, previously had revealed the government’s bottom-line thinking when he said that “we are going to make sure we get value for money for our citizens.” The Kenyan government eventually opted for a multipartner approach with US and Chinese systems including Huawei—a company that has deep roots in African markets. This dual technology stack consisting of Chinese and US systems inevitably places Kenya and other countries across Africa in between the two major powers. This shows how great-power competition can prompt states to balance between rival systems, as Kenya positioned itself, given the opportunities to leverage its position to benefit from both powers.
The Huawei case in Kenya is not isolated. Compared with Beijing, which for decades has invested heavily in African economies (not without criticism regarding its policies toward debt in particular), Washington has not prioritized African investment. As was the case with Kenya and Huawei, in recent years the US government has devoted much attention to “scolding” African countries about their economic ties to the PRC while providing comparatively little in the way of concrete investment, at least compared with Beijing’s aggressive economic diplomacy.
Broader Chinese influence within Africa
Strategic investments beyond narrowly technological ones, especially in education, skills training, and culture, have enormous consequences for the development of African tech-centric ecosystems. Such investments influence how Africa’s growing youth cohorts see opportunity and perceive pathways to success, including in (but not limited to) technology ecosystems.
In this form of economic diplomacy, the PRC approach appears to be more thorough and comprehensive than the American one. The PRC’s investments in African tech ecosystems are broad, extending beyond just trade and markets. To further its diplomatic influence and economic reach, Beijing’s engagement has expanded into other arenas—some adjacent to the tech sector; others not as much—such as education and cultural influence. This strategically extends China’s sway in countries throughout the Global South while reducing that of the United States.
One of China’s strategies is to target young students who are at the center of Africa’s largest economic growth markets and are the main drivers of technology innovation and adaptation within Africa. For example, the PRC government has created scholarship opportunities for African students to study in China. China also has established educational programs (through Confucius Institutes) in forty-seven African countries which encourage young Africans to immerse themselves in Chinese culture.
Conclusion
An “America First” foreign policy footing does not have to be at odds with greater global engagement by the US government and its private firms. There remains a tremendous opportunity for US leadership in Africa through strategic technological partnerships built upon mutual trust and respect that at the same time advances US economic and national security interests. A reset in relations with African states to counter the PRC’s growing influence in Africa could have outsize impact—both for its positive benefits for American national security and economic security, and for decreasing Africa’s dependencies on Chinese technology infrastructure.
Although the abrupt elimination of many foreign aid programs and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) itself may have come as a shock, the investment gap that resulted resets how US companies and organizations can engage in Africa. They can engage African governments and the private sector based upon anticipated return on investment and market gains. (Such a shift would require that the US government continue to expand its interest in prioritizing the financing or underwriting of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure investment in Africa and elsewhere, as it has recently signaled in its reauthorization of the US Development Finance Corporation under the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.) This paradigm shift could result in more strategic long-term planning involving partners both from Africa and the United States working together for value-added outcomes.
For the United States to compete with the PRC and win in Africa, it must adopt and align strategic policies on several fronts at once—which optimally would include investment and trade through technologically oriented exchange, tech-based innovation, and tech-focused education. Outpacing the PRC in Africa, to the benefit of the United States both on economic and national security grounds, is imperative given Beijing’s first-tier status as a global rival. Among other things, the US government will need to prioritize competitiveness. The PRC’s investment in infrastructure, plus the integration of its technology systems in Africa, have given Chinese companies a competitive cost advantage compared with those from the United States. If the United States wants to make inroads in Africa, the US government, working alongside its tech companies, must leverage its advantages for mutual benefit. There is little question that the United States possesses some of the best tech firms and technologies in the world. US tech giant Nvidia, to name just one of many examples, has dominated the global AI microchip market with its superior graphic processing units that are used for AI training, high-quality visualization, gaming, scientific simulations, and other applications. The challenge for the United States will be to demonstrate how partnerships with its companies are to the benefit of African countries and companies even in instances when US firms are at a cost disadvantage relative to Chinese ones. Among other considerations, US firms will need to ascertain where their technologies are mismatched for African markets, for example where digital capabilities in African countries do not support cutting-edge technologies that American firms offer. One of Huawei’s advantages, to illustrate, is that it sells technologies to meet demand in Africa for high-bandwidth and low-latency ICT networks, upon which locally tailored AI systems can be built.
Finally, the successful deepening of US-African engagement will be a two-way street. Going forward, mutually beneficial relationships should develop where African countries show that they are interested in meeting the United States along the interest continuum. The chances of such outcomes occurring will be much stronger if African countries continue to develop their governance structures to fully take advantage of technologically based exchange with the United States. Measures include ongoing domestic investment in digital literacy and STEM education, development of financial incentives to attract foreign investment, clear and consistent regulation of digital services (including at a regional level), and sustainable tech-focused strategies in general. The bottom line is that all sides have sufficient incentives to leverage technological investment for mutual gain in one of the world’s fastest-growing markets.
About the authors
Conrad Tucker is currently serving as a science and policy fellow in the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is an internationally recognized researcher and educator whose work has significantly advanced the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to engineering design, manufacturing, and digital health. His research addresses a central challenge in modern engineering systems: reducing manual, time-intensive processes across the design-to-manufacturing pipeline through data-driven, physics-aware computational methods.
Ginger Matchett is an assistant director with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, where she focuses on the strategic foresight portfolio assessing trends, opportunities, and security threats shaping the future around the world. She works on global environmental, food, and water security, the impacts of climate change on security and defense, human rights, and US-China competition.
Samantha Wong is an assistant director with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, where she helps research and devise allied strategic solutions to the global challenges posed by China’s rise, with a particular emphasis on defense and technology.
Peter Engelke is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security as well as a nonresident senior fellow with its Global Energy Center. His diverse work portfolio spans strategic foresight, innovation and technological disruption, geopolitics and hard security, climate change and Earth systems, and urbanization, among other topics.
Acknowledgements
The Atlantic Council would like to thank the Tides Foundation for supporting the Council’s work on this publication.
The Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security works to develop sustainable, nonpartisan strategies to address the most important security challenges facing the United States and the world.
The Global China Hub tracks Beijing’s actions and their global impacts, assessing China’s rise from multiple angles and identifying emerging China policy challenges. The Hub leverages its network of China experts around the world to generate actionable recommendations for policymakers in Washington and beyond.
Image: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Kenyan President William Ruto attend a welcome ceremony at The Great Hall of The People on April 24, 2025 in Beijing. IORI SAGISAWA/Pool via REUTERS