Towards understanding and harnessing the potential of Africa in digitalization 1 BACKGROUND Nowadays, the digital transformation is an intensive subject that refers to all the changes related to a process with the integration of advanced digital technologies such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, three-dimensional printing, artificial intelligence, and transportation in all aspects of human society. Digitalization affects any firm, any sector, any type of job, any function in organizations/institutions. Then it has become ubiquitous in multiple domains such as oil and gas, disease management, finance, banking, transportation, education, healthcare, agriculture, energy, environment, gastronomy, government services, and so forth. Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most-populous continent. Despite a wide range of natural resources, the continent suffers from many problems such as poverty, diseases, illiteracy, weak infrastructure, political instability, and conflicts. The continent features a relatively young population, as well as a diaspora of expatriate African researchers all willing to contribute to its development. Digital communication has spread very fast with improved access to the Internet. All these must enable an African shift to a successful digitalization transformation story with the promotion of technological advancements. The promotion of high education and research in Africa is one of the important keys for achieving digital transformation. This special issue has been launched by five researchers: four from African countries: Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia, and one from the African diaspora, working in France. This issue is dedicated to African young researchers contributing to digitalization efforts. An open call for papers has been organized, where it attracted 25 papers covering topics related to digitalization transformation, more particularly big data analytics, data integration, data mining, social media data exploitation, decision support systems, cloud computing, smart applications, Internet of Things, data security and risk, web services, quality of data transmission, recommendation, and combinatorial optimization methods. All submissions were peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers from our international program committee consisting of academia and industrials from 12 different countries and working on the various topics of our special issues. After two rounds of reviews, we finally accepted 11 papers, making an acceptance rate of 44%. One of the interesting characteristics of our accepted papers is that some of them integrate real case studies involving important domains in Africa such as Algerian mobile telecommunication and transportation services in the Maghreb countries. We