A statistic that has become almost background noise in African development circles is that 90 percent of the continent’s youth leave school without basic digital skills. The usual prescription follows a predictable script: more coding bootcamps, more digital literacy campaigns, more curriculum reform. Maggie Gu, founder and president of the Tomorrow Foundation, thinks that entire framing misses the point.
Gu, whose organisation runs initiatives including 100 Million Learners, Her Startup, and AI for All, argues that skills are the wrong thing to focus on in the first place. Her reasoning is blunt. Skills depreciate rapidly, she says, while agency compounds. That single line challenges much of how governments, donors, and technology companies currently approach preparing young Africans for an AI driven economy.
Gu applies the same critical lens to the gender gap among tech founders in Africa. She does not see the barriers facing women as a matter of ability. Instead, she describes them as structural. Professional networks are not formally closed to women, she explains, but they are built around patterns of relationship and trust building that do not match how women typically build social and professional capital. Add caregiving responsibilities that most programmes fail to account for, and the obstacles become clear without any single door being deliberately shut against them.
The scale of the challenge Gu is describing is enormous. Roughly 12 million young people enter Africa’s workforce every year, but only about 3 million formal jobs are created to absorb them. The continent’s youth population is projected to reach 830 million by 2050. Yet Gu insists the underlying dynamic is not uniquely African. It is a global shift that Africa happens to be experiencing at unusual speed and scale.
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Her flagship initiative, AI for All, is built around the idea of sovereignty rather than mere literacy. For Gu, sovereignty means the capacity to build, govern, and direct AI systems, not just use tools designed elsewhere. A country that only trains its young people to operate AI tools built and governed abroad will always be downstream of decisions made somewhere else, she argues. A country that develops the capacity to create, adapt, and govern its own AI systems becomes an active participant in the global technology order instead of a passive recipient of it.
Framed that way, Gu’s argument becomes as much political as technical. Questions about who trains AI models, who owns the underlying data, and who decides how algorithms treat African markets and communities are not simply engineering problems to be resolved quietly by technologists, in her view. They are political choices, and she believes African governments need to start treating them that way rather than leaving them to industry.
Perhaps the most quietly radical part of Gu’s argument concerns how certificates and credentials are currently valued. Rather than measuring readiness by paper qualifications, she suggests the more useful question is whether young people can actually create value and shape opportunity around them, a shift that would upend how training programmes across the continent are designed and funded.
