Technology

How Kenya’s Konza Technopolis evolved from land sales to cloud-driven revenue. A data-driven look at whether Africa’s Silicon Savannah is finally monetizing its digital vision.

Gold has bewitched humanity for millennia—adorning crowns, backing currencies, and more recently, fueling financial hedges. But as this glittering metal edges toward $4,000 an ounce in 2025, one question sparkles brighter than ever: how much of it is actually left?

Not too long ago, “the cloud” was a fuzzy metaphor tech marketers used to describe servers we didn’t want to think about. Fast forward a decade, and it has become the beating heart of the digital economy. In 2017, global cloud infrastructure revenues hovered at a modest $50 billion. By 2024, they’d ballooned to $330 billion, according to Synergy Research. What was once a niche IT utility is now a planetary-scale industry—one that’s quietly redefining how every byte of modern

Few things illustrate China’s modern agricultural story better than fertilizer. Back in the 1960s, when food security was a national obsession, fertilizer use per hectare was barely a blip on the chart—just a sprinkle. By the 1980s, as reforms unleashed productivity, Chinese farmers were practically showering their fields with nitrogen, potash, and phosphate. Fertilizer wasn’t just an input; it was Beijing’s magic bullet to feed a billion mouths.

For 70 years, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has evolved from simple rulebooks to powerful neural models that write code, answer questions, and compose poetry. What started with hope and heuristics is now reshaping industries — and conversations. This is how NLP went from naïve to probabilistic to neural.

When it comes to moving people across vast distances, the world remains heavily tilted toward roads. But the degree to which countries rely on roads versus rails varies significantly—and tellingly—across economies.

China’s roads used to hum with the roar of internal combustion engines. Not anymore. In 2024, nearly half of all new cars sold in China—48%—are electric, a figure that dwarfs the global average of 22% and places China well ahead of most advanced economies.

Africa accounts for 19% of the world’s population but only 3% of global GDP. This disparity is starkly visible in its energy investment: while Africa spends 3.6% of GDP on energy, slightly more than the global average of 2.9%—its investment per capita is just USD 68, compared to the global average of USD 402. According to World Energy Investment 2025 - IEA.