Growing the digital platforms sector could boost the economy significantly, study shows:
The digital platforms sector, which includes e-commerce and financial technology (fintech), has the potential to grow South Africa’s economy but infrastructure and economic challenges are holding the country back, according to a report released by Naspers this week.
The report projects that the sector could contribute as much as R91.4 billion to the economy by 2035 and has increased its share to 1.38% from 0.02% in 2022. This growth includes a cumulative tax contribution of R10.7 billion.
It could create over 341 000 and 157 000 full-time equivalent jobs, based on monthly earnings of R12 000 and R26 000, respectively.
The growth of digital platforms in South Africa enables inclusive participation in the economy, Naspers South Africa chief executive Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa said.
“These platforms effectively lower traditional market barriers, enabling diverse and previously marginalised groups to participate meaningfully in the economy,” she said.
The report, published in partnership with the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, notes that constraints relating to infrastructure, accessibility, costs and redundant regulations are hindering South Africa’s drive towards digital transformation.
“Reliable electricity, IT infrastructure, data centres, logistics networks (including roads, transport and mapping) and access to affordable bandwidth are all essential for powering devices, processing data and payments and ensuring efficient supply chains and last-mile delivery,” it said.
“Incumbents and startup platforms alike are increasingly realising that they cannot take advantage of platform opportunities because of their inadequate digital tools, skills and security issues.”
According to the report, the average cost of 1GB of mobile data in South Africa is around R33, making it more expensive than other African countries such as Nigeria, Namibia and Kenya.
South Africa has a “stable macro-environment characterised by a relatively low inflation rate and steady currency and interest rates”, which set it apart from other African nations, making it an attractive investment market but weak economic growth and high unemployment are setbacks.
“A protracted low-growth environment and a small population limit the scalability of local platforms. Broad reform efforts aimed at growing the economy and increasing household incomes will improve the fortunes of digital platforms,” the report says.
The digital economy is projected to contribute 5.2% and 7.8% to GDP in Africa and South Africa, respectively, by 2025, with potential growth to 8.2% and 13% by 2050.
“Platforms in innovation (like software and app stores), classifieds (such as AutoTrader), and accommodation (for example, Trivago) are seeing broad adoption,” the report says.
The e-commerce market, which includes platforms such as Takealot.com and Checkers Sixty60, is valued at between $ 5 billion and $ 6 billion, representing 6.3% of total retail value, and boasts between 11 million and 18 million users.
Fintech companies such as Yoco are also growing rapidly. According to the report, revenue in this market is projected to reach $ 434 million in 2024, driven by developments in digital payments, digital assets and neo-banking, a form of online banking. The portfolio of assets in fintech is valued at $ 7.5 billion and slated to have significant impact and potential for future growth.
E-hailing services like Uber, and food delivery platforms such as Mr. D, are expanding fast but are approaching critical scales.
According to the report, the ride-hailing sector, valued at $ 350 million, is set to expand at an annual rate of 2.9%, reflecting increasing demand for convenient transport solutions.
Digital platforms are increasing competition by allowing price comparisons and have a social impact in areas like agro, health and educational technology, although these sectors are still emerging.
But South Africa also needs to consider new challenges.
“Key concerns include the potential impact on job security and losses, limited market competition for both consumers and businesses, and issues surrounding privacy and access to services,” the report says.
The media has failed Gaza — journalist Youmna El Sayed says:
On 13 May 2021, the air in Gaza City was thick with tension. As explosions erupted around her, journalist Youmna el Sayed stood live on camera, reporting from the epicentre of the conflict.
The Gaza Strip, already battered by years of siege and warfare, had once again become a battleground as Israel unleashed an 11-day military offensive.
This was not the first time El Sayed had faced such peril; over the years, she had become an unwavering witness to the cycles of bloodshed that defined life in Gaza.
Two and a half years later, on 8 October last year, El Sayed found herself in a familiar situation. She reported in real time, live on air, as an Israeli missile targeted the tower behind her — a building symbolic of media freedom, home to numerous media institutions Al Jazeera colleague Wael Dahdouh— in retaliation for a Hamas attack the previous day.
As the tower crumbled, El Sayed was no longer just an observer of the destruction; she was a survivor, living through the very story she was reporting.
This time, however, the scale of devastation was far greater. The death toll mounted, and with it, the weight of the stories she had to tell.
Among those stories was that of 11-year-old Ashfaaq, who emerged from an ambulance in Khan Younis, his face bruised.
Clutching a blue backpack tightly against his chest, he approached El Sayed and said: “Do you know what I have here?”
Inside the bloodstained bag was his little brother, Ahmed — a grim reminder of the human cost of war.
For El Sayed, these were not just stories, they were personal battles.
As a mother of four young children, with her eldest just 13, she found herself in an agonising position. The struggle between her duty as a journalist and her instinct to protect her family weighed heavily on her, tugging at her with every live broadcast she delivered.
The war wasn’t just something she reported on — it was something she and her family endured daily.
The trauma reached breaking point just four days after her Al Jazeera colleague Wael Dahdouh lost his family in an Israeli airstrike.
El Sayed’s own home was targeted. Her husband received an anonymous phone call: “You’re speaking to the IDF (Israel Defence Forces). You need to take your family and leave your home right now. Otherwise, your life will be in danger.”
The specificity of the call made it clear — they were targeting her family because of her work as a journalist.
“The moment I heard my 12-year-old scream at me, ‘We’re going to die because of you!’ I felt my world crumble,” she recalls, her voice thick with emotion. “To be in that position as a mother, when all you want to do is protect your children …”
After three months of relentless daily reporting, the situation became unbearable.
El Sayed and her family were forced to flee Gaza, leaving behind everything they knew, in search of safety.
They escaped under the cover of sniper bullets and shelling, with the journalist carrying the heavy burden of choosing between her profession and her responsibility as a mother.
In the months that followed, El Sayed found herself in Cairo, grappling with survivor guilt.
“Why did I survive? Why was I able to come out?” she questioned.
The only solace she found was in continuing to speak about Gaza from the outside. It was this drive that brought her to Johannesburg, where she addressed a gathering of journalists during her tour of Southern Africa.
Hosted by the humanitarian journalism portal Salaamedia, El Sayed’s message was clear — the media had failed the people of Gaza.
“We have reached a time when the global media has become very professional in exposing everything and anything that happens in any part of the world. Yet, the media’s integrity is compromised when it becomes politicised, when it follows agendas instead of standing as an authority for justice, for the people, regardless of all governments,” she said.
“In Gaza, this failure was palpable. The media failed us. They failed to amplify the voices of the people of Gaza, to connect them to other people in the world.
“The popular support we see now among people in different areas of the world has come after many months of suffering, after many lives have been lost.
“People are now searching for voices from inside Gaza — voices that can give evidence of the crimes against humanity being committed.”
For El Sayed, telling a story is no longer enough.
“Your role as a journalist, as a voice, is to amplify,” she said. “It’s not just about speaking to decision-makers and government officials.
“It’s about connecting people who endure daily sufferings with others around the world. If government officials don’t care, then the people of the world should support those who are suffering.”
Her journey from Gaza to Johannesburg is not just the story of a journalist but of a mother who bore the weight of her children’s lives on her shoulders while carrying the responsibility of telling the world about the atrocities in her homeland.
“I had to make the choice between my profession, my career and my responsibility as a mother,” she reflected.
Now, as El Sayed advocates for her country from outside its borders, she remains steadfast in her belief that the role of journalists is not just to report but to bear witness, to give a voice to the voiceless and challenge the forces that seek to silence them.
Her advice to young journalists who fear for their future is simple yet profound: “Always remember that the people in the story are more important than any organisation or institution you work under.”
In a world where the lines between truth and propaganda are increasingly blurred, El Sayed stands as a testament to the courage and conviction it takes to tell the stories that matter, even when the cost is personal.
Her journey is a powerful reminder of the moral and ethical role of journalists in times of genocide — when bearing witness is not just a profession, but a duty to humanity.
Mining the potential of green industry:
A July TED talk by Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, had already reached 648?293 views at the time of writing. It is not a good-news talk.
Essentially, the scientific assessment is that the average ocean temperature is rising dangerously and some of the earth’s key natural systems of absorbing carbon are at tipping point.
In other words, places like the Amazon are at risk of being transformed from forest to savannah because of deforestation. It is no secret our global systems of producing and consuming food and appliances are costly for the planet and those costs are not properly reflected in national accounting systems.
To put it technically, the negative externalities associated with production are typically offloaded onto those who can least afford it. Elites, meanwhile, will pay for air conditioning as temperatures soar beyond 50°C in many cities and continue to jet around the world in planes powered by fossil fuels.
Rockström is not entirely pessimistic, though, and exhibits some faith in the ability of renewable energy to help us move towards “net zero” by 2050, if we combine this with workable marine and terrestrial protection to safeguard the integrity of our carbon sinks and avoid massive biodiversity losses.
Basically, we need to move back to a situation where the earth can safely absorb our carbon output. We are not on that trajectory. So, what could mining and green industrialisation possibly have to do with this gloomy truth?
At Good Governance Africa (GGA), we recently proposed a 10-point priority plan for the incoming government of national unity (GNU) or “grand coalition”. In addition to ensuring the basic building blocks of democracy, such as improving political accountability and ensuring greater levels of citizen engagement, democracy must also deliver material dividends. This is not easy to achieve in the context of adapting to climate change, alongside mitigating its causes.
Nonetheless, it remains the case that the world will require more mining in the future, not less, to provide the minerals and metals that are crucial ingredients in products (like solar panels and electric vehicles) that power the renewable energy and transport revolutions under way.
For South Africa, this has serious implications. We therefore wrote this into our 10-point summary:
Unlocking mining and industrial potential
The problem: South Africa’s mining industry has been deteriorating in terms of its direct and indirect contribution to GDP over the past two decades.
While it has occasionally earned well and bolstered the treasury’s finances through foreign exchange revenue from exports, the overall trajectory of investment in mining has been a decline.
While several sectors outside of gold have grown nominally, the potential appears vastly underutilised. This is attributable to numerous factors but poor mining policy, deteriorating infrastructure and dysfunctional ports, rail and road (logistics) are among the most urgent requiring attention.
GGA’s recommendation to the GNU: Pay close attention to the internal and external factors that determine the lack of exploration and expansion investment in mining.
A key approach will be to thoroughly reform the minerals governance landscape in the direction of making it far simpler to apply for (and be granted) licences, at the same time as reforming the department of mineral resources to enforce the law far more consistently across provinces.
The department should, similarly, work closely with other departments to remove macro-level obstacles to investment in the sector.
We must go beyond this, in time, and connect mining to green industrialisation. This is because industrialisation remains the optimal channel through which to absorb labour.
In less technical terms, South Africa has to (re)grow its industrial base if it is to achieve job growth.
Jobless growth is not an option, as growing joblessness entails untenable socio-political costs.
At an overall formal unemployment rate of 33.5%, according to the latest data, the call for economic reform could not be more urgent.
Technical work we’ve done at GGA shows Southern Africa is almost certainly suffering “premature deindustrialisation” — a decline in the manufacturing industry (in terms of both output levels and share of overall economic employment) sooner than our industrialised counterparts and at lower levels of per capita income.
Our move into services is relatively low value and not sufficiently labour absorptive.
South Africa specifically appears to be suffering from “Dutch Disease” — even though mining has declined as a sector, mineral rents (a high dependence on mineral sales and exports for foreign exchange and tax revenue, respectively) still appear to be causally related to declining manufacturing.
Ironically, the solution is more mining, not less, but mining has to be more directly connected with industrialisation.
This is not a simplistic matter of trying to “beneficiate” the raw materials produced in the country, though that could be part of the rationale, where sensible. For instance, it makes sense for South Africa to produce catalytic converters.
It remains true, of course, that Finland did not become a global furniture manufacturer just because it had vast natural forests. It turns out it didn’t excel in furniture at all. However, it did develop cutting-edge tree-cutting technology, which ultimately resulted in firms such as Nokia taking off.
These are what economists call “side-stream” linkages.
There is also extensive upstream manufacturing opportunity, which South Africa once boasted in abundance. Every effort needs to be made to recraft an industrial sub-sector specialising in mining equipment.
Because of the closeness of the “product space” to other forms of manufacturing, such as passenger or freight vehicles, the economic spillover effects could be significant.
All of this will remain ethereal unless appropriate and credible conditions for investment are created. That means we must continue to address our energy shortage in a systemic and sustainable way. No investment without reliable energy.
Similarly, logistics — all infrastructure, roads, rail and ports — need to be optimally tuned to attract labour-absorbing investment. And perhaps it goes without saying crime, from petty theft to extortion to grand corruption has to be radically removed.
To bring it full circle, lasting solutions to these problems need to be birthed in the soil of much greater levels of political accountability.
Ross Harvey is the director of research and programmes at Good Governance Africa.
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