Telecom magnate Strive Masiyiwa, who chairs the Econet Group, is on the 2018 FORBES list of African billionaires as Zimbabwe’s first billionaire. FORBES estimates Masiyiwa’s net worth at $1.7 billion. In this interview with CNBC Africa, on the day he launched Pathways For Prosperity as a co-chair with Melinda Gates in Nairobi, he says Africa needs to harness technology to drive inclusive growth.

Africa needs to utilize technology and create jobs. How do we strike the right balance?

It’s not a question of striking a balance; it’s a question of building momentum. Jobs come from enterprise. We don’t need jobs from public service, public service is good, but public service can’t create jobs. What creates jobs is entrepreneurship. We need to believe in our own entrepreneurs. There is no difference between the entrepreneurs who started Google and the entrepreneur who started Ushahidi. They probably went to school together. So we have extraordinary young people with entrepreneurial ideas. What we need is to build an ecosystem to support them. The reason Mark Zuckerberg could create a business that quickly is because there was an ecosystem there that could provide capital, support, expertise, and highly-skilled people to join his organization; that’s the only difference. And it begins with the right policies, it begins with supportive governments who believe that if we nurture these guys, and support them until they list on the Kenyan Stock Exchange, until they hire people, that’s the only place jobs are going to come from.

We are a continent where growth is happening but we have a huge challenge of the population not being touched by some of this growth; how do we use technology to make it work for everyone?

Those are the very questions that have let us sit and create this commission [Pathways for Prosperity], because we are saying, ‘wait a minute, we are seeing GDP growth, but we’re not seeing employment growth, we are not seeing the levels of poverty in Africa coming down as they are in Southeast Asia’. We need to sit down and have conversations about this and look for pathways to prosperity, as we clearly haven’t created them for a major part of our population and there is a lot of frustration and disappointment. We can’t all just shout and scream at governments; we all have to come together and try and see how we can go forward.

We have seen a lot of talk of blockchain and bitcoin… In Africa, are regulators up to speed?

I won’t comment on blockchain and cryptocurrency; that requires another day and another conversation, but the way regulators in Africa will have to approach these new technologies has to be different from the way they have done in the past, because for a start, the new technologies coming through are more profound than anything we have ever seen. If you think computers or mobile phones were extraordinary technologies, you have got to see what’s coming through from areas like biotech, AI, sharing economies, even energy. The combustion engine car we have known for 100 years will be gone before that beard of yours turns white (laughs). By 2040, you will not be allowed to drive, you won’t have anywhere to buy petrol in Europe, and maybe even India. If the people who manufacture the cars have stopped manufacturing, we will have electric cars.

It’s going to be incredibly disruptive but it’s not a cause for concern because new businesses emerge from that. What’s important is our entrepreneurs have to be skilled and supported quick enough to take advantage of opportunities as they emerge so we are not turned into consumers of other people’s technologies. It will be disruptive right through. The teachers must think differently to prepare kids differently; the regulators must see things differently; so it’s going to be much more inclusive; that’s why we are creating a platform for that kind of conversation. – Interviewed by Charles Gitonga