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.
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.
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