Chad
GDP per capita to 2060, by scenario
Constant-rate scenario path; the 2060 endpoint levels are illustrative, not forecasts.
Factor profile
Military governments, very weak state capacity, or limited access to the AI supply chain keep these countries from converting AI into growth.
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
A large share of the workforce remains in agriculture and informal activity. This provides some initial insulation from cognitive automation but also limits the speed at which existing workplaces can capture productivity gains.
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 Chad starts
Chad enters the AGI era in the high-risk and volatile group: countries cut off from the AI supply chain, or whose states are too fragile to turn AI into growth. The scores show why. Compute and energy access is 1 out of 5, the floor. Physical build speed and AI diffusion capacity both sit at 1.2, cyber resilience at 1.3. Roughly one in ten Chadians has electricity. The economy leans on oil pumped through the Chad–Cameroon pipeline, and on herding and cotton. Security drains the budget: the army fights Boko Haram around Lake Chad and hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees from Sudan. One score points the other way. Catch-up headroom is 4.5, because at about $1,022 per person there is vast room to grow. Ten-year trend growth is 2.2% a year. This is a lower-income country.
The three paths
These are simulations, not forecasts. The Modest path is the baseline; the two AGI scenarios branch off from it. Under the Modest scenario, AI stays a normal technology. Chad would hold its trend: 2.2% growth a year, 112th of 157. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would rise slowly over two decades and reach 2.7% a year once AGI matures around 2045. Yet Chad's rank would fall to 152nd, because faster-growing countries would pull away. At 2.7%, an economy still takes about 26 years to double. Under Fast takeoff, growth would also reach roughly 2.7% a year, arriving from the early 2030s, and rank 150th. The barely higher growth alongside a far lower rank is the whole story: a fast world rewards the compute, capital and stability Chad lacks, so others race ahead while Chad edges up. Politics could slow or redirect any of these paths. How Chadians and their leaders respond to transformative AI is a variable the model holds constant.
How you would know which world you are in
The scenarios look almost identical until about 2030. So watch leading signals, not GDP, and check them live rather than trust one snapshot. Three global tells 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. Chad's own signals would come earlier than the growth data: oil volumes through the Cameroon pipeline, the pace of electrification and grid extension, fiber links through neighbours, and mobile-internet take-up.
If growth goes explosive
For Chad it would not. At 2.7% growth a year, Chad's path is modest by world standards and a relative decline against the frontier, which would compound at nearly 39% a year in a fast world. It would also trail its own region, whose median growth would be higher under both AGI scenarios. The economy would still take about 26 years to double, so a child born today would reach her mid-twenties before national income doubled. Chad's young and fast-growing workforce, once its main asset, is the very input AI can substitute for. The honest downside is being left behind: with almost no compute of its own, Chad would rent intelligence priced and controlled abroad, and its most skilled young people could leave for places where AI raises wages fastest. The hedge is unglamorous — electricity, connectivity and schooling first, so the country can use AI at all. Even a modest path would test the state: managing oil revenue in N'Djamena, keeping the grid running, and providing security across a vast, thinly governed territory.
What Chad can do now
Three levers follow from the scores, and two pay off whether or not AGI arrives. The first is AI diffusion capacity, at 1.2. Basic digital skills, AI literacy and digitizing government services would help the state work better in any world, so this is a no-regret move. The second is physical build speed, also 1.2. Faster permitting, pre-zoned land, and above all extending the grid and generation would lift the economy under every scenario, since so few Chadians have power today. That too is no-regret. The third lever is the bet. Compute and energy access, at the floor of 1, barely moves growth if AI stays ordinary, but under a fast takeoff it becomes Chad's biggest lever — chip access through partners and, later, hosted computing. A $1,022-per-person economy cannot fund this alone, so it needs partners and concessional finance. Chad can borrow from a peer: DR Congo is pushing to develop the Inga hydropower complex to close its power gap, and Chad could package its abundant Sahara solar the same way. A cautious government can act on the two no-regret levers today at no loss. Open the atlas's policy editor to see how moving these scores reshapes Chad's path under each scenario.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change Chad’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 Chad: 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.