This TED Talk features technologist Kamau Gachigi, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

By the year 2050, the population of Africa will have doubled. One in four people on Earth will be African at that point.

Now, this is both really exciting and daunting all at once. It's really exciting because for the first time in the modern era,

there'll be enough Africans on the earth to bully everybody else.

I'm only kidding.

But it's daunting because we're going to have to have economies

that can sustain this population growth,

and many of the people are going to be very young. Now, most governments in Africa have a plan for this economic growth in Kenya, we call our Vision 2030,

and they're all predicated on industrialization.

The thing is, though, that the world is going through the fourth industrial revolution right now,

which means that there's a merger of the physical, cyber and biological worlds.

It means that because of massive interconnectivity and the availability of artificial intelligence

and robotics, many of the jobs that we know and are used to right now won't exist in the future.

So the challenge is a lot greater in many ways than it even was when Asia was industrializing, for example.

To add to this, one of the kinds of per person that you need for industrialization is an engineer,

and they're really in short supply on the continent.

If you compare, for example, the number of engineers that those same Asian countries had a couple of decades ago when they were industrializing,

we fall far short.

And I've taught for a while, and many of the students who are studying engineering end up actually working in auditing firms and banks,

and many of them spend half their time doing accounting and so on as they're preparing.

Now, I was fortunate enough to do my undergrad and post-grad education in the UK and the

US, in countries, environments where there was all the equipment that you required, all the

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