18/08/2026
AI CAN DRIVE SOUTH AFRICA'S ENTREPRENEURIAL FUTURE
Johannesburg, 18 August, 2026
Entrepreneurship is a significant part of South Africa’s economy, supporting economic activity, employment and innovation across formal and informal markets. For many entrepreneurs, the environment in which they operate is changing quickly.
Technology has fundamentally reshaped that landscape. Digital platforms, automation and artificial intelligence are creating new ways to build businesses, reach customers and participate in the digital economy.
The shift is opening doors that barely existed a generation ago. Yet access to technology alone does not guarantee meaningful progress.
Farad Chohan, School Manager: MANCOSA School of Information and Digital Technology (SIDT), says this changing environment presents entrepreneurs with both opportunities and challenges.
Stop Copying and Start Solving
Chohan points out that the real opportunity is not to produce African versions of the world’s largest technology companies. It is to identify problems close to home that existing systems have failed to solve. His message to entrepreneurs is deliberately practical: look at the community first.
“Africa’s experience with mobile financial services provides a useful model. Technologies built around the widespread availability of mobile devices demonstrated how an existing constraint could produce a different route to financial transactions. Rather than recreating infrastructure found elsewhere, innovators worked around what was missing,” says Chohan.
The same thinking could be applied to transport, informal commerce and other industries.
Chohan points to the public taxi sector as one example where local entrepreneurs could use digital platforms to address needs within an existing African industry. “The broader principle is more important than any individual application: disruption often arrives quietly, through somebody finding a better workaround to an everyday problem,” says Chohan.
According to Chohan, African businesses do not need to compare themselves horizontally with Google, Meta or other global technology groups. Their starting point can be much closer to home.
AI Is a Tool, Not the Starting Point
That distinction becomes particularly important with artificial intelligence.
The pressure to incorporate AI into products, education and business processes can encourage organisations to begin with the technology and search for a problem afterwards. Chohan argues for the reverse.
“Students and entrepreneurs need a grounding in AI, machine learning and related technologies, but technical familiarity alone is insufficient. The more valuable skill is identifying a genuine problem and deciding whether AI is an appropriate tool for addressing it. We don't just plug in AI into every single problem,” says Chohan.
The implications extend well beyond entrepreneurship. As automation changes existing occupations, attention often centres on which jobs could disappear. Chohan believes Africa should be asking another question: which jobs are emerging that people are not yet being trained to perform?
“We need to look at AI project managers, AI auditors, ethics specialists and domain experts as examples of where education could evolve. Rather than preparing graduates around one platform that may soon change, institutions can develop people capable of adapting as the underlying technology moves,” says Chohan.
Education Has to Move With Industry
That challenge is becoming more urgent because technological change is moving faster than conventional curriculum cycles.
Chohan argues that the gap between what economies need and what educational institutions produce should not be viewed solely as an education crisis. It is also a talent opportunity.
At MANCOSA, that thinking has influenced how technology is incorporated into programmes. The institution’s approach is not to confine digital capability to students pursuing explicitly technical qualifications. Instead, Chohan says technology is being woven into fields including commerce, business management and entrepreneurship.
The practical difference is significant.
A marketing student can encounter data analytics, digital platforms and AI-supported insights alongside conventional customer behaviour. Finance students need exposure to fintech, automation and real-time decision systems, while aspiring entrepreneurs must understand how businesses can be built, scaled and adapted in digital environments.
MANCOSA’s wider SIDT offering reflects that emphasis, spanning areas including AI, cybersecurity, data science, cloud computing, blockchain and digital transformation.
Chohan points out that knowledge itself is no longer the scarce resource it once was, application is becoming the differentiator.
Africa’s Languages Represent an Overlooked Opportunity
One of the clearest examples of the gap between global technology and African needs can be found in language.
Chohan notes that Africa has more than 2,000 indigenous languages, while widely used AI systems have largely been developed from datasets that do not fully represent the continent’s linguistic and cultural context. That creates a limitation, but also an entrepreneurial opening.
Local datasets and language technologies could make digital products more useful to communities currently poorly represented by mainstream platforms.
“The issue also touches data sovereignty. African innovators need to think carefully about the integrity and ownership of data while designing systems around indigenous environments. The goal should not be imitation for its own sake, but technology that makes sense where it is actually being used,” says Chohan.
This is where Africa’s scale and diversity become difficult to ignore. Local languages, informal economies and community-specific problems create markets that global platforms may not naturally be designed to serve.
Entrepreneurs Should Not Wait for Perfect Conditions
While technology does offer many benefits, Chohan warns that it waits for nobody. “Technology changes quickly. Regulation and education frequently move more slowly. Entrepreneurs who expect every condition to be settled before acting may find that the market has already moved by the time they feel ready,” says Chohan.
He cautions against the pursuit of perfection before testing an idea, arguing that entrepreneurs learn about markets through the process of building and responding. The tools needed to begin are increasingly accessible, and local communities provide no shortage of problems worth examining.
“This does not remove Africa’s genuine infrastructure, capability or regulatory challenges. Chohan acknowledged that access to technology and the ability to use it effectively are not the same thing. Governments, businesses and educational institutions still have considerable work to do. But those constraints need not define the continent’s technological future” warns Chohan.
The more consequential question may be whether Africa sees emerging technology primarily as something developed elsewhere and consumed locally, or as a set of tools that African entrepreneurs can use to build for their own markets.
For Chohan, the opportunity lies firmly in the latter.
The continent does not need another Silicon Valley. It needs entrepreneurs prepared to examine the environments around them, identify problems that matter and apply technology with purpose. In an AI-driven decade, that may prove far more valuable than simply trying to catch up.
Building Africa’s Digital Future From Within
Africa’s digital future will not be defined by how closely it follows established technology markets, but by how effectively its entrepreneurs respond to local realities.
For Chohan, that means combining technical capability with curiosity, adaptability and a clear understanding of the problems communities face.
Education has an equally important role in preparing people for work that is still emerging. As AI develops, the opportunity is to build solutions rooted in African markets, languages and experiences, rather than simply importing them.
