Mali
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 Mali starts
Mali enters the AGI era in the high-risk and volatile group: countries cut off from the AI supply chain, or whose states are too stretched to turn AI into growth. The scores show why. Compute and energy access is 1 out of 5, the floor. Cyber resilience is 1.1 and climate resilience 1.3, both near the bottom of the 157. Mali is a landlocked Sahel state, facing drought and a long jihadist insurgency, ruled by a military junta that has left ECOWAS and turned toward Russia. Its one clear strength is catch-up headroom, 4.4 out of 5: it starts so far behind that there is vast room to grow. Gold from mines like Loulo-Gounkoto, cotton through the CMDT, and hydropower from the Manantali dam anchor the economy. Ten-year trend growth is 4.3% a year. At about $1,193 per person, this is a lower-income country.
The three paths
These are simulations, not forecasts. The Modest path is the baseline, and the two AGI scenarios fork from it. Under the Modest scenario, AI stays a normal technology. Mali would hold its trend at 4.3% growth a year, ranked 41st of 157 — high, because a modest world keeps most economies slow and Mali's headroom shows. That doubles the economy in about 16 years. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would rise slowly over two decades and reach 5.2% a year around 2045, a doubling every 14 years or so. But Mali's rank would fall to 126th, because faster-moving economies with compute and capital pull ahead. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach only 4.1% a year from the early 2030s, ranked 136th. That is below Mali's own trend: a fast world would leave Mali growing more slowly than it would have without AGI, because speed rewards the compute, chips and stability it lacks most. Regulation and politics could slow or redirect any path. How Malians and their leaders respond to transformative AI is a variable the model holds constant.
How you would know which world you are in
The three scenarios look alike until about 2030, so watch leading signals, not GDP, and check them live. 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 would signal a gradual one. A fade back to trend would signal a modest one. Mali's own signals would arrive earlier than GDP data: gold export receipts and new mining contracts, the pace of grid connections and electricity access, and how fast mobile money and digital services spread among ordinary Malians.
If growth goes explosive
For Mali, explosive is the wrong word. Its best case, 5.2% growth a year under gradual takeoff, sits just above trend and below the Sub-Saharan median of 5.7%. The frontier, meanwhile, would compound near 39% a year in a fast world, so Mali would fall further behind, not catch up. At 5.2% the economy would double in about 14 years. A child born now would reach her teens in a country roughly twice as rich — real progress, but slow beside the leaders. Mali's workforce is young and growing, and faster growth at home would raise wages and ease the pressure to leave for Europe or the coast. The honest downside is the export ladder. Gold and cotton are the rungs Mali has climbed, and a fast world could reprice both while offering no new rung to grab. The hedge is to widen the base — power, food security and skills — rather than lean harder on raw exports. Even the modest path would test the state: the junta, the courts, the mining ministry and the security forces would all have to permit, tax and protect faster than they do now.
What Mali 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 1.5 but weighty even in the skeptic's world. Digital skills, permissive rules for deployment and digitized government services help the economy under every scenario, so this is a no-regret move. The second is physical build speed, at 2.3. Faster permitting, pre-zoned land and transmission built ahead of demand would raise growth on any path, and they are what any later power investment would need — another no-regret step. 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 carries the most weight of any factor. Closing it means power and land packages to attract investment, which Mali cannot fund alone. DR Congo, a peer in the same group, is advancing the Grand Inga hydropower scheme to expand its power base; Mali can pursue the same logic at smaller scale, building on the Manantali dam. 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 moving these scores changes Mali's path under each scenario.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change Mali’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 Mali: 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.