While boardrooms chase Asia, a resilient francophone tech arc from Casablanca to Tunis offers the UK nearshore talent, time-zone advantage and a strategic alternative to the Digital Silk Road. Indeed, British firms have long drawn a straight line from London to Bangalore. That line is now costly in time, in resilience, and in strategic exposure. North Africa offers a shorter, smarter line: bilingual engineers, faster-growing startup ecosystems, and a geopolitical opening the UK can no longer afford to ignore.
For twenty years, the UK’s global strategy in tech and services has run on autopilot. Offshore to India. Source from Eastern Europe. Export to the United States. That model worked until it didn’t. Today, supply chains look fragile, global competition is sharper, and the world’s digital frontier is shifting toward regions that British executives rarely factor into their plans.
One of those regions sits just across the Mediterranean. From the Atlantic hubs of Morocco to the innovation corridors of Tunisia, French-speaking North Africa is powering through a digital acceleration with implications far beyond its borders. What was once treated as a peripheral market is becoming a nearshore engine of talent, technology and geopolitical leverage.
This is not a matter of hope or hype. It is driven by structural forces: demographics, education, capital flows, infrastructure investments and shifting alliances in global technology systems.
Africa is the youngest continent on earth, with more than 60 percent of its population under 25. By 2050 it will host the world’s largest workforce. North Africa benefits from that demographic curve but also from something else: an education system that produces bilingual engineers in large numbers. French is the foundation, but English is now a requirement for high-level tech programmes in Morocco and Tunisia.
Local universities have added AI, cybersecurity, cloud architecture, robotics and applied mathematics to their core curriculums. Private institutes, some backed by French, Gulf or American partnerships train thousands of software engineers a year.
While UK companies struggle to hire cybersecurity staff or data scientists at home, North Africa has become a net exporter of these skills. And unlike distant markets, it operates on London-friendly hours. Time-zone proximity is not a luxury. It is a competitive edge. A team in Casablanca works in near real-time with London. Product sprints move faster. Support centres are more responsive. On-site visits take hours, not days. It is the difference between a partner and a distant vendor.
The Money is already moving
The idea that Africa lacks a tech ecosystem has been outdated for years. Capital has noticed. According to the 2024 Partech Africa Tech Venture Capital Report, African startups raised USD 3.2 billion across 534 equity and debt deals in 2024, with Partech noting that “African tech showed relative resilience despite global headwinds.” Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia and Côte d’Ivoire are emerging as francophone strongholds in fintech, AI, agritech and logistics”.
Morocco in particular is gaining momentum. The Morocco Startup Ecosystem Report 2024 (UM6P / StartupReport) highlights rapid growth in AI applications for agriculture, digital banking, SaaS solutions for SMEs, and industry 4.0 tools built for export. Casablanca is now competing with Dakar and Nairobi as an African innovation hub.
Across the continent, startup ecosystems have become more sophisticated, more connected and more investor-ready. And importantly for the UK, francophone Africa benefits from regulatory harmonisation across several markets and greater currency stability through the CFA zone.
The Strategic Blind Spot: China’s Digital Silk Road
The UK’s hesitation is happening while another major power is accelerating. China’s Digital Silk Road has become the largest financier of digital infrastructure in Africa larger than all Western democracies combined. This includes 5G networks, cloud data centres, smart city systems, surveillance architecture and the technical standards that shape digital governance.
As Chatham House warns, the Digital Silk Road exports “a full-stack model of technology, standards and influence that could define Africa’s digital trajectory for decades.” Infrastructure is never neutral. Whoever builds it shapes the rules, the dependencies and the political alignment that follow.
For the UK a country whose economic future leans heavily on digital trade, cybersecurity and data governance ignoring this shift is not an option. Offering a democratic, standards-based alternative is not a charity project. It is a strategic necessity.
Partnership with North Africa is the most direct way to do that. It is within reach, culturally familiar, and geopolitically aligned with Europe’s push for secure, transparent digital systems.
A Commercial Opportunity Disguised as Strategy
The economic case is as strong as the geopolitical one.
The Afreximbank African Trade Report 2024 stresses that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is “the most significant opportunity for integrated growth in a generation,” opening access to a 1.4-billion-person market with harmonised rules. North Africa is the natural gateway into that market for businesses seeking both scale and stability.
Yet UK engagement is falling behind. According to the Tony Blair Institute’s Reset and Revitalise: UK-Africa Trade and Investment, while African GDP has grown more than 20 percent in the past decade, UK exports to Africa have halved. That is not a gentle decline. It is a sign of strategic drift. The UK cannot afford to keep watching this curve move in the wrong direction.
Not Outsourcing – Co-Building
There are challenges. Infrastructure is uneven. Bureaucracy can slow things down. Regulation can be complex. But these are solvable issues. The key is adopting a partnership model rather than a transactional one.
A modern UK-North Africa strategy would include: co-investing in incubators, digital academies and coding institutions; creating nearshore engineering hubs linked to UK firms in fintech, AI and cybersecurity; joint R&D programmes with universities in Morocco and Tunisia; directing development finance toward open-standard cloud and data infrastructure; embedding digital chapters in UK trade negotiations; easier, faster business mobility through targeted visa reforms. This is how you build an ecosystem, not a subcontracting chain.
Britain stands at a crossroads. It can keep watching its influence fade in a region that is rising. Or it can recognise the opportunity just across the Mediterranean, a young, ambitious, tech-driven arc that wants partners, not patrons. The choice is simple. The next strategic tech partner for the UK is not only in Bangalore. It is in Casablanca, Tunis, and beyond. If British leaders want resilience and relevance, it is time to cross the Mediterranean.
