A very, very long time ago, survival depended on collective memory and careful observation of nature. Gathered, possibly, around a campfire, humans told stories, taught hunting techniques and described safe routes. Knowledge passed from mouth to mouth, subject to forgetting and distortion.
Now imagine that, in that primitive world, there existed, and everyone could hear, something like ChatGPT — a voice able to answer any question, combine information from different sources and offer immediate solutions. With that resource, tribes would have learned to polish tools, domesticate plants and animals or explore new routes in far less time. Knowledge would circulate freely, uniting communities that had previously lived in isolation. Cooperation would increase, repeated mistakes would diminish and creativity would find fertile ground in which to flourish.
In the lands we now call Mozambique, the change would be remarkable. Peoples living in areas such as Niassa or the Zambezi Valley could have identified medicinal plants more quickly, built sturdier vessels to explore the Indian Ocean, or planned harvests according to climate patterns that had been recorded and shared. We could even imagine trade networks long before the time of foreign merchants, linking coastal and inland communities in an early and dynamic economy.
This vision, however hypothetical, serves to shed light on the present. Today, Mozambique is already undergoing a process of digital transformation: more people have access to the internet, the mobile phone has become the main gateway to the online world, and tools such as mobile banking shorten economic distances. However, just as in that distant past, a large part of the territory, especially in rural areas – where the signal is weak and the cost of access is still an obstacle – remains cut off from these opportunities.
And the question is not only having technology, but also knowing how to apply it. The future will be more promising if digital literacy reaches every community, if information is adapted to local needs and if global knowledge is combined with the experience that already exists on the ground. Current examples show that when fishermen use digital forecasts to decide when to put to sea, or farmers receive pest alerts by mobile phone, the impact is immediate and tangible.
The lesson is simple: it is not enough to have a modern “campfire” where knowledge is shared. We must make sure everyone can sit around it. If in those distant times a tool like ChatGPT would have cut centuries from evolution, today we have a real opportunity to accelerate development, provided there is a will to share, learn and create together. Mozambique, with its youth and rich diversity, has every condition to do so, and perhaps this is the real civilisational leap that matters.
