In the never-ending quest to look beyond what's next, I stumbled across an article in CRMBuyer suggesting that Africa was the inevitable future location for global IT outsourcing, once India had successfully used outsourcing to bootstrap its population into the middle class. While recognizing that the article appears to be largely based on a report from a company which just happens to facilitate global outsourcing, the logic is pretty sound. Africa won't always be a mess. If you're interested in the drivers of change in the coming decades, pay attention now to the places most people ignore.