As the pandemic rages, and nations, corporations and individuals struggle to cope, we must pause to think of what it all means for Africa (Jayaram et al. 2020; ECA, 2020). We must sift through the debris to see if it left a compass that can point the way to a better future. We all too often forget that in the midst of a tragedy, a road map can emerge. Furthermore, for a continent like Africa caught in a trap of deprivation, the kind of disruption inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic offers it an opportunity to pull away to a more economically sustainable future. Uncertainty is not new to Africa, given its level of development. The globalization of uncertainty, wreaked by COVID-19, may well be the disruption Africa needs to leapfrog in its development journey. The topic of my speech today, which is also the theme of this conference, ‘Charting a Path Through Uncertainty’, gives us an opportunity to explore this thesis.