<p>Digitalization is widely promoted as Africa’s shortcut to prosperity, framed by policymakers and development actors as an engine of innovation, financial inclusion, and employment. Mobile money systems, platform work, and e-commerce are often presented as inherently progressive, implying that technological adoption alone guarantees empowerment. This article challenges that narrative by examining digitalization through a Pan-African feminist political economy lens. Rather than neutral or inevitable, Africa’s digital transformation is unfolding within global and local structures of power shaped by colonial legacies, neoliberal capitalism, and cis-heteropatriarchal norms. These dynamics reproduce unequal labour regimes, where African workers, especially women and gender-expansive people, are concentrated in precarious, undervalued, and invisibilized forms of work. At the same time, data and natural resources continue to be extracted to the benefit of global capital and domestic elites, with little redistribution to resource-rich communities. By interrogating the politics of ‘leapfrogging’ and inevitability narratives, the article highlights how digitalization often reinforces inequalities under the guise of development. Yet it also identifies the potential for more transformative futures; digital economies that expand freedoms, strengthen solidarities, and advance justice if reimagined through afro-feminist principles of equity, care, and collective well-being.</p>