Global South at Crossroads: Becoming a Tech Hub or Remaining a Digital Raw Material Supplier?
According to the International Desk of Webangah News Agency, The expansion of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is fundamentally altering the global labor market, a trend that could position Global South countries as new hubs for technology development and intellectual property, or conversely, perpetuate their reliance on low-cost labor and external infrastructure.
The World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” report indicates that by 2030, digital access, AI, and automation will transform the operations of 60% of global businesses. This shift is expected to drive up demand for technology-related roles, including those in artificial intelligence, big data, and cybersecurity.
Estimates suggest that labor market transformations over the next four years could result in the creation of 170 million new jobs while eliminating approximately 92 million. Olga Ergneva, Associate Professor at Saint Petersburg State University of Economics and an expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences, noted that nearly 40% of current professional skills will need to change, requiring 59 out of every 100 workers to retrain or upskill. These transformations are not confined to developed economies.
Ergneva emphasized in an interview with TV BRICS that the growth in AI-related job opportunities is gradually extending to developing economies. She cited the World Bank’s observation that AI-related job openings are increasing even faster in middle-income countries than in high-income economies. The number of job advertisements requiring generative AI skills has surged approximately ninefold between 2021 and 2024, with nearly one-fifth of these opportunities located in middle-income countries.
Analysts anticipate a rise in demand for new jobs within Global South nations. However, their primary need extends beyond AI developers to specialists capable of integrating these technologies across various industries. Key sectors with significant employment potential include data analytics, cybersecurity, fintech and digital payments, cloud computing, robotics and automation, agri-tech, digital health and telemedicine, IT education, e-commerce, digital logistics, and geographic information systems. Furthermore, localizing AI for national languages and datasets will be crucial.
Experts warn that 65% of children currently in school will enter professions that do not yet exist, a projection highlighted in the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” report and discussed in UN commission meetings. This presents a significant challenge for Global South countries, whose educational systems must adapt to evolving labor market demands.
Timofey Voronin, Deputy Director of the Center for Strategic Research and Technological Development Analysis at Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Graduate School of Social Sciences, stated that while traditional state institutions are often slow to adapt to new jobs and the necessity of revising educational standards, Global South countries often demonstrate the ability to leapfrog development stages and move directly toward new technologies. He explained that traditional university education models change slowly in many developing countries, with government educational standards typically taking six to nine years to update. Consequently, by the time a new discipline or skill is incorporated into curricula, the technology may have already advanced beyond it.
However, schools and universities are tasked not only with immediate labor market responsiveness but also with imparting foundational knowledge that enables specialists to acquire new skills and discard obsolete tools in rapidly changing technological landscapes. Ergneva believes Global South educational systems should shift from teaching specific professions to fostering continuous learning and rapid retraining abilities.
Developing economies face dual challenges: a shortage of specialized teachers in areas like generative AI, big data analytics, and robotics, and a digital divide exacerbating unequal access to technology and communication infrastructure. Despite these obstacles, the Global South possesses advantages in the digital race, notably its young population. Voronin pointed out that the average age in Africa is around 19.5 years and in South Asia is approximately 28, representing a large demographic that has grown up with smartphones. He added that there is an increasing trend away from traditional university degrees toward acquiring specialized competencies and specific skills in these countries, as they have recognized sooner than many that a university degree no longer guarantees employment.
In India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Kenya, and other nations, intensive, practical courses known as “bootcamps” have proliferated, enabling participants to acquire diverse practical skills in a short period. Major IT companies and educational technology platforms also offer short-term courses and specialized certification programs. This trend allows developing country specialists to enter global markets and increase their income, reducing the necessity for them to migrate to capitals or leave their home countries for employment opportunities in smaller African, Indian, Latin American, and Southeast Asian cities.
Ergneva highlighted the digital labor market’s potential, noting that programmers, data analysts, designers, engineers, educators, or consultants can offer their services directly to a global market of substantial scale. According to UNCTAD data, the value of digital services exports from developing economies was projected to reach approximately $1.3 trillion in 2025, having surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2023. The platform economy also exemplifies this potential, with World Bank estimates suggesting the gig economy constitutes up to 12% of the global labor market. Low- and middle-income countries account for about 40% of the traffic on global digital labor platforms. During the reviewed period, job opportunities on a major platform in sub-Saharan Africa increased by 130%, compared to only 14% in North America.
While the increased attention from major companies and international employers to specialists from developing countries creates new opportunities, experts also caution against the risks associated with the new digital economy structure. They argue that the primary concern is not just the potential replacement of human labor by AI but, more importantly, the Global South’s position within the digital value chain. Ergneva posed the critical question: “What position will these countries occupy in the new digital value chain? Will they remain solely providers of cheap digital labor, or will they become developers of their own technology, platforms, data, and intellectual property?”
Isabella Rocha-Dashicheva, a Brazilian expert on geopolitics and technology governance in BRICS and the Global South, and head of the BRICS+ Assembly for Strategic Technology in Brazil, concurs. She points to the Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI), an analytical tool assessing a country’s capacity to independently manage digital infrastructure, maintain resilience, and reduce reliance on external technologies and solutions. The DSI generally indicates how independently a government and society can chart their digital development path, especially under external pressure.
Studies cited by Rocha-Dashicheva reveal that many Global South countries possess skilled technology users, developers, and relatively developed regulatory bodies but remain dependent on other nations for external infrastructure, platforms, intellectual property, and value chains. She concludes that the priority must be to transform the adoption of digital technologies into domestic production capacity, ensuring that specialists remain within their countries and preventing brain drain. According to her, Global South countries increasingly need specialists in technology transfer, digital industrial policy analysis, public procurement experts, AI auditors, and individuals who can coordinate between academia, governments, and the production sector. Crucially, developing individuals capable of creating and developing native IT projects and platforms is essential.
Such an approach could prevent the emergence of a “digital raw material” model, where the dependency structure of economies reliant on raw material exports is replicated in the digital realm. In the traditional model, Global South countries supplied cheap resources to global markets but received a limited share of the final product’s value. Ergneva explains that in the digital economy, data and cheap digital labor could replace oil, minerals, and agricultural products. Activities such as data labeling, content moderation, basic programming, call center operations, and micro-task execution might be outsourced to developing countries, while the most profitable segments of the chain—algorithms, cloud infrastructure, platforms, patents, brands, and intellectual property—remain concentrated in a few global technology centers.
Experts believe that developing countries need strategic decision-making, financial investment, and reforms in education and specialist training to capitalize on digitalization opportunities and become new centers of intellectual property. Voronin outlines several priorities: focusing on teaching architectural thinking and prompt engineering rather than limiting children’s education to basic coding; strengthening independent learning and rapid retraining abilities; developing skills in combining knowledge from different fields; and enhancing interdisciplinary education for children and adolescents. He also stresses the necessity of effective partnerships between government and the private sector, where the government sets the fundamental frameworks, and businesses, research centers, and industrial enterprises actively participate in updating educational content.
This approach, experts contend, could foster specialists capable of developing intellectual property and advanced IT, ultimately strengthening the digital sovereignty of Global South countries, rather than merely training cheap labor. Rocha-Dashicheva emphasized in her interview with TV BRICS: “The defining jobs of the future will be those that enable the Global South to move from limited sovereignty to the ability to determine how technologies are created and regulated, and how they are used for national development.”
