Cabo Verde
GDP per capita to 2060, by scenario
Constant-rate scenario path; the 2060 endpoint levels are illustrative, not forecasts.
Factor profile
They earn from what cannot be sent down a wire: visitors who come, and workers abroad who send money home.
How this economy meets AI
Today’s production, workforce and automation baseline — context for the scenarios, outside the AGI Growth Index.
Where output comes from (% of GDP)
Where people work (% of employment)
Informal employment
Current automation exposure
Several parts of the economy could transmit AI’s effects. The pace depends on adoption by firms, connectivity and movement of workers between sectors.
This country is not covered by the Global Automation Atlas’s public country file; its task-level exposure work for other countries is at automationatlas.org.
Sources: World Bank WDI; ILOSTAT; Global Automation Atlas (Garg, Crosta & Baier, 2026). The latest available year is shown for each measure; vintages differ, so shares may not sum to 100.
Where Cabo Verde starts
Cabo Verde is a stalled-middle economy: middling income, middling scores, slow growth. The archetype fits a small Atlantic archipelago that is neither frontier nor fragile. Its strengths are human. Demographics and migration score 4.7, catch-up headroom 4.3, and language inclusion 4.3, helped by Portuguese and Creole ties to a large diaspora. The binding constraint is physical. Compute and energy access scores 1, the lowest band: the islands have almost no data center capacity and a thin, costly grid run by the utility Electra. At about $5,796 GDP per person, capital to build is scarce. Ten-year trend growth of 3.4% a year rests heavily on tourism. Real assets exist — the Praia Technology Park and Atlantic cable landings — but the compute gap defines every path.
The three paths
These are simulations, not forecasts. The Modest path is the baseline; the two AGI scenarios fork from it. Under the Modest scenario, AI stays a normal technology. Cabo Verde would sit near its trend at 3.6% growth a year, 50th of 157 — its best world rank of the three. Tourism and services would keep carrying the economy. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would climb over two decades and reach 9.3% a year once AGI matures around 2045, ranking 64th. That pace doubles the economy in under eight years. The long ramp would give skills and diffusion time to spread across the islands. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach 9.8% a year from the early 2030s, a doubling in roughly seven years. Yet Cabo Verde's rank would slip to 74th, down ten places, because a fast world rewards the compute and geopolitical weight it does not hold. Its own gains would rise while others race ahead. Politics could slow or redirect any of these paths. How Cabo Verdeans and their government respond to transformative AI is a variable the model holds constant.
How you would know which world you are in
The scenarios look almost the same until about 2030. The late 2020s add only fractions of a point to growth. So watch leading indicators, not GDP, and watch them live. Three global signals matter most. First, whether the METR task horizon curve keeps doubling every four to five months through 2027–28; METR publishes it at metr.org. Second, whether frontier lab revenue and capital spending keep compounding; Epoch AI tracks both at epoch.ai. Third, whether growth in the ten to twenty most-ready economies — the United States and China above all — breaks above trend in the early 2030s. Double-digit growth there within a couple of years of 2030 would signal a fast world; a point or two above trend by the mid-2030s a gradual one; a fade back to trend a modest one. Cabo Verde's own signals would arrive earlier: new cable landings and hosting deals on its soil, tenants filling the Praia Technology Park, and digital-service exports in the balance-of-payments data.
If growth goes explosive
Explosive is relative. At 9.3% growth a year, Cabo Verde would run well ahead of its region, whose median sits near 5.7% under the same gradual scenario. But it would trail the frontier badly, because the United States would compound at roughly twice its rate. Against its own history the shift is large: growth near 9% doubles the economy in under eight years, so a child starting school now would finish it in a country twice as rich. Digital services could grow alongside tourism, and rising wages at home would ease the long pull that sends skilled Cabo Verdeans abroad. There is a way this leaves the country worse off. It would rent its computing power rather than own it, and set few rules in whichever chip regime it joins. Capacity priced and controlled abroad can be throttled or repriced. The hedge is to bargain for guaranteed access and to own a share of what gets built. Even then, the pace-setter would shift to the state, testing how fast a small administration spread across ten islands, its ministries and the utility Electra, can permit, connect and count.
What Cabo Verde can do now
Three levers follow from the scores, and two pay off whether or not AGI arrives. The first is AI diffusion capacity, low at 2.1. Digital skills, deployment-friendly rules and digital government carry real weight even in the skeptic's world, so this is a no-regret move. Start where the state already touches citizens across the islands. The second is geopolitical positioning, at 2. Cabo Verde's special partnership with the EU and its stable democracy are assets to protect; deepening trusted-partner ties and keeping access to capital markets pays off under every scenario, so it too is no-regret. The third lever is the bet. Compute and energy access, at 1, is the lowest score and barely moves growth if AI stays ordinary. Under a fast takeoff it becomes the single biggest lever. Closing it means packaging firm power, cheap land and quick permits, and bargaining for chip access, since a $3bn economy cannot fund the build alone. Cabo Verde can adapt a working model: Thailand used investment incentives to draw AWS and Google data centers. A cautious government can act on the two no-regret levers today and lose nothing if the skeptics are right. Open the atlas's policy editor to see how shifting these scores would bend Cabo Verde's path under each scenario.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change Cabo Verde’s modeled path. The roadmap builder below can then incorporate those targets into a 1,000-day planning prompt.
Drafted with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, from the atlas’s data and an editorial template set by the author.
Create a 1000-day AGI and growth roadmap prompt
This prompt can be used with Claude, ChatGPT or an open-weight model hosted on your institution’s systems. It includes the atlas material for Cabo Verde: the country brief, economic structure, region, archetype and global scenarios. It instructs the model to ask for local information, use existing strategies and the political calendar, and preserve the atlas’s interpretation rules. The prompt is assembled in your browser; the information entered here is not sent elsewhere.
1 · Read the brief → 2 · Set targets in the policy editor → 3 · Generate and copy the prompt → 4 · Run it with an approved model, with high reasoning effort and web access where permitted
Instructions are generated in the selected language; the data annex remains in English. Translations are machine-drafted, and corrections from native speakers are welcome through the contact links on the start page.