Leveraging digital technology to promote economic development in Africa post COVID-19
“If your house was on fire and you had 60 seconds, what would you take?”. This situation is metaphorically similar to what happened at the beginning of the pandemic outbreak. If the outside world, proximity, and basic day-to-day activities became a threat to humanity, what is the one major thing that humanity found refuge in? Well, I’m glad you asked.
Digital tools, data, and internet connectivity came to the rescue. This trio helped save people’s jobs, gave them access to information about the global pandemic situation, allowed them multiple services and helped governments prevent many worst-case scenarios.
The African fight against viruses has gone digital since before COVID-19 as our continent has gone through health-related challenges in the past. We learned that in such times of massive shortage in resources, the key to a sustainable future is self-reliance.
If we take a look at the social tech-projects that emerged during the pandemic, we can see how since African digital innovators joined the fight against COVID-19 the governments’ mission to contain the virus has been more structured and unquestionably more efficient. As an example, allow us to take you to our Kenya, where a Kenyan entrepreneur, Ronald Osumba, came up with mSafari; an app that provided the Kenyan Ministry of Health with contact tracing data of people who travel internally using public transport. A very simple daily activity, yet in the context of this pandemic, very deadly. It is astonishing how a simple idea can have that big an impact in generating timely data about the virus’ spread. And this is the mindset that we need to instil in our innovators.
The key to self-sufficiency is to do an accurate reading of the terrain and reuse existing systems to pave our way to sustainability. The perfect example here is a Nigerian initiative where IT apps are being adjusted for basic telephones, independently from Internet access, and to be used in national languages such as Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. As puts it Joshua Setipa, Managing Director, UN Technology Bank in his statement: “By enabling developing countries to produce these technologies themselves, we can help set them on the path to recovery.”, and not only recovery from this specific situation, the way we see it is that digitization leads us to recover from the economic, social, and infrastructural deficiencies.
In the era of exploitation of raw materials, digital innovation paved a way for an independent, self-standing economy. It created a diversified job market that brings together multiple actors. Whether it’s the government, entrepreneurs, civil society, or corporates they all found in technological innovation a tool to uplift their commercial and financial statuses. It even goes beyond that, economic growth feeds social prosperity. The outcome of this overlap is shown through two main metrics: quality of life and equality of access to basic services, which are two sides of one coin. Since in emerging economies, a slight increase in the digitization endeavours, such as better delivery of public education and other government services, results in a significant impact on the lives of people, even a greater impact than that in advanced economies that depend on more complex factors.
This right here is our lifeboat. As challenging as our economical ecosystems might be, it could still be seen as a huge opportunity for improvement where a simple idea can have a meaningful influence on the lives of people as well as on the country’s GDP.
We need the wave of digitization to go beyond fighting viruses and reach new horizons in every other field there is. Because deadly scenarios do not stop at people’s healthcare only. Poverty is dangerous, food insecurity is threatening, and so are dictatorships. So what we are setting up here is a new system where governments and communities foster an innovation culture and build for a future where the strength of our continent resides in our very existence.
