What Adebayo Ogunlesi taught me about Africa’s future and its greatest threat

BY TIMI OLAGUNJU

At a recent Africa Business meeting organised at the Harvard Business School (HBS) and hosted by erudite Prof. Hakeem Belo-Osagie, I had the rare opportunity to sit across the table from Adebayo Ogunlesi, founder of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), now a board member at OpenAI and a key player in one of the largest infrastructure investment deals globally, with BlackRock’s recent $12.5 billion acquisition of GIP.

Ogunlesi’s words were both sobering and catalytic. As a lawyer and someone who has worked on digital policy at the intersection of innovation and governance, his insights stuck with me because they were grounded in real-world wisdom, with deep implications for innovators, startups, and governments across the Global South.

Africa does not need to reinvent the wheel

For Africa’s emerging entrepreneurs and tech disruptors, Ogunlesi offered a surprising perspective: you do not need to start from scratch. In fact, he pointed to India as a model for adaptive innovation. “Look at what India has done, replicating scalable, digital solutions with local relevance,” he said. “You can copy and localise models. Innovation is not always about creating something entirely new, it is about solving real problems in new ways.”

This feels especially relevant in an age where the myth of Silicon Valley as the global epicentre of innovation is losing its grip. Ogunlesi reminded us that the U.S. is not necessarily the beacon of digital innovation alone. Countries such as India, Estonia, Singapore, and even Rwanda are pioneering models of digital governance and platform innovation worth studying and emulating.

The real crisis facing Africa is not AI. It’s leadership

Yet the most urgent takeaway came when Ogunlesi turned his focus to Africa’s future, and its looming crisis.

With a rapidly growing population and over 60% under the age of 25, Africa faces an unprecedented demographic shift. “More people mean more jobs,” Ogunlesi noted. “But AI and robotics are already rendering some traditional jobs obsolete. Governments need to ask: What kind of future are we building for our youth?”

Sadly, as he pointed out, many African governments are not giving this issue the attention it desperately needs. In his words, “this could become one of the greatest global crises, second only to climate change.” If we continue to ignore the intersection of automation, employment, and education reform, the future will be unequal by default.

And he is right. While policy discussions often focus on macroeconomics or climate targets, they rarely confront the silent emergency of youth economic displacement. If we do not respond with urgency, through skilling programs, entrepreneurship investment, and digital infrastructure, we may be sowing the seeds of instability.

On the U.S. and the manufacturing myth

Ogunlesi also offered a refreshing counter-narrative to the U.S. job-loss rhetoric. “America is not primarily a manufacturing economy,” he explained. “It is a services economy.” While around 500,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared over the decades, more than triple that number have been created in the services sector, including in logistics, tech, finance, and insurance.

Rather than romanticising the industrial past, Ogunlesi’s analysis points us toward the need for economies, African or American, to build resilience by skilling for the future, not the past.

Infrastructure is about leadership, not just capital

We closed on infrastructure, Ogunlesi’s core domain. He posed a rhetorical but powerful question: If there were $6 billion available for infrastructure investment in Africa, where should it go to yield the greatest return?

The answer was not roads, rails, or ports. It was leadership. “If you get leadership right,” he said, “everything else falls into place.”
As someone focused on tech policy and governance, that hit home. It is not a lack of capital that is holding us back. It is a lack of visionary, accountable leadership that can build trust, attract private investment, and align infrastructure with human development goals.

Africa’s story is still being written. And in Ogunlesi’s message sends both a warning and a path forward: we do not have to be original to be impactful, but we must be intentional. Especially when the costs of inaction, on youth, innovation, and infrastructure, are no longer theoretical.

If we want to shape the future, we must lead now.

Timi Olagunju is a lawyer and AI governance, policy wonk, a Masters in Public Administration (MPA)/Mason Fellow at Harvard University’s J.F. Kennedy School of Government. He is a partner, Timeless Practice, a former policy fellow at Global Integrity in Washington D.C, a 2024 Internet Society Fellow, an IRI Gen-Dem Advisory Board member, and a recipient of the Mandela Washington Fellowship in 2015. You can follow him on Twittter @timithelaw