Fostering creativity, innovation in Africa

Africa must start thinking seriously about self reliance and strengthening her capacities. FILE PHOTO | NMG 

By BITANGE NDEMO

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Summary

• Governments on the continent are not pulling their weight to ensure sustainability of the emerging solutions that can become major enterprises.

Multinational organisations (MNOs) and the Donor Community (DC) do a great job in fostering creativity and innovation in technology among the youth in Africa.

But African governments do not augment this goodwill. Indeed, governments on the continent are not pulling their weight to ensure sustainability of the emerging solutions that can become major enterprises.

It should be recalled that many of the successive solutions such as M-Pesa, Facebook, Twitter, Wechat etc., were at some point nascent start-ups that muzzled significant resources for marketing to make them successful.

Such success has become elusive in Africa as demonstrated by NexTech Summit held in February last year where Microsoft, in partnership with GrowthAfrica, launched the #Insiders4Good East Africa Fellowship.

Their objective was to seek support for emerging entrepreneurs as they turn their business ideas into reality and scale.

About 20 entrepreneurs from Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda who had innovative social business ideas with the potential to improve their communities, the region and the world were selected in June 2017 and begun their six months training programme.

The winners received a suite of Microsoft hardware and software and six months of tailored technical and strategic mentorship from local and international leaders.

Several solutions addressing critical local problems emerged. In order for these nascent enterprises to scale up, they will require significant resources that they cannot raise.

Failure to support these young people in their hour of need means that someone will pick up their idea and take off.

The following are some of the problems they sought to solve and the solutions.

Our healthcare system lacks efficient and comprehensive digital records systems, which increases the risk of misdiagnosis and presents a missed opportunity to collect public health data.

In this, Peter Aketch’s Mensa Healthcare uses artificial intelligence to provide actionable data to government agencies, public health organisations, and pharmaceutical companies.

Edgar Mwampinge noted that 80 per cent of graduates in Tanzania struggle to find employment. Lack of jobs has spurred increasing rates of crime, violence, extremism and drug abuse among the youth.

His Worknasi.com aspires to make a shared office workspace possible by making it easier for start-ups and freelancers to succeed by connecting them with businesses and office owners who want to share their working spaces and meeting rooms.

In Rwanda, Ange Uwambajimana designed IV Drip Alert, a device that enables nurses to more easily manage intravenous fluids through a wireless alert system.

This is in response to serious problems like air embolisms that can occur if the observer forgets to change the IV at the correct time.

Kenya’s John Mugendi developed a breast cancer prediction system. His Lyons Analytics proposes to develop a predictive and prescriptive system that uses machine learning to track the progression of breast cancer from onset to late stages.

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He hopes this will deal with the problem where 70-80 per cent of these cases are diagnosed when the cancer is already in late stages.

All this is happening in Africa, but we do not take time out to celebrate the achievements.

More importantly, we need to develop a system on how to nurture these ideas, commercialise them and arrange how they can be supported by universities to deepen their understanding of the problem to build a more comprehensive solution.

For African countries to create employment, they must invest in promising innovative solutions with potential to scale across the world.

Unfortunately, both governments and local successful enterprises fail to see such opportunities.

This is the result of lacking the confidence to stand behind local innovations unless they are validated by dominant innovative nations.

This acquired cultural orientation simply fails Africa. Lisa Ann Murkowski, a US Senator from Alaska, once said, “Freedom comes from strength and self-reliance.”

Whatever the MNOs and DCs are doing in Africa is great, but Africa must start thinking seriously about self-reliance and strengthening her capacities as a strategy for achieving real freedom.