The Computer Society of Kenya

Since 1986

phoneBusiness Daily By Okuttah Mark and Agencies

Wednesday, December 12  2012

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) innovations are delivering home-grown solutions in Africa, transforming businesses and driving entrepreneurship and economic growth, says a new report.

The report by the World Bank and African Development Bank, with support from the African Union says in the last five years, Africa’s mobile phone market has rapidly expanded to become larger than either the EU or the United States’ with some 650 million subscribers.

At the same time, Internet bandwidth has grown 20-fold as hundreds of thousands of kilometres of new cables have been laid across the continent to serve an increasing number of its one billion citizens.

The new access is quickly changing lives and driving entrepreneurship, fuelled in part by collaborative technology hubs, and delivering innovation and home-grown solutions for Africa.

The report emphasises the need to build a competitive ICT industry to promote innovation, job creation, and boost the export potential of African companies.

Africa’s Internet bandwidth has increased 20-fold in the past five years, supported by over 68,000km of submarine cable and 615,000km of national backbone networks.

In the new report eTransform Africa: The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, the authors follow that growth, documenting innovations in ICTs and advances in access for the population.

“The Internet and mobile phones are transforming the development landscape in Africa, injecting new dynamism in key sectors. The challenge is to scale up these innovations and success stories for greater social and economic impacts across Africa over the next decade,” says Jamal Saghir, World Bank director for sustainable development in the Africa region.

Innovations in eight key areas: The eTransform Africa report identifies best practices in the use of ICTs in eight key areas: agriculture, climate change, education, financial services, government, health, ICT competitiveness and trade facilitation and regional integration.

Agriculture: In Kenya, the Kilimo Salama programme is providing crop insurance for farmers, using the M-Pesa payment gateway, helping them to better manage natural hazards such as drought or excessive rainfall.

“A common information system/platform for stakeholders—businesses, farmers, researchers and government —such as DrumNet (Kenya) has been shown to improve efficiency by minimising the duplication of data, ensuring consistency, improving integrity of data,” says the report in part.

Kilimo Salama made its debut as a pilot project in 2009, insuring 200 maize farmers in Nanyuki region. It is spreading to cover wheat, sorghum, cotton, beans and coffee in addition to maize.

It is a project of the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, which does research on improving harvests on small farms.

The non-profit foundation is financed by the Swiss agri-giant, Syngenta. Kilimo Salama also gets money from the International Finance Corporation, a sister organisation of the World Bank. Syngenta Foundation weather stations like the one in Matanya, Kenya, use solar power and computerised gauges to send out data on rainfall levels.

Climate change adaptation: In Malawi, a deforestation project is training local communities to map their villages using GPS devices and empowering them to develop localised adaptation strategies by engaging communities.

Financial services: In Senegal, SONATEL (a subsidiary of Orange) is one of the latest operators on the continent to launch a money transfer service that is enabling 200,000 subscribers to send and receive money using mobile phones.

Health: In Mali, telemedicine is helping overcome the lack of trained healthcare workers and specialists in rural areas, specifically the IKON Tele-radiology programme.

“This report not only sheds light on the path Africa is already on, but also encourages continued creative thinking in how to utilise ICTs to benefit more Africans,” says Gilbert Mbesherubusa, Acting Vice-President Operations, African Development Bank.

From trade facilitation to technology hubs: The report shows how countries such as Kenya and Senegal are implementing ICT-enabled trade facilitation initiatives and outlines the key role that Africa’s regional economic communities can play in supporting greater regional integration for boosting economic growth and reducing costs.

“When the Kenyan government allowed exam results to go online, it provided a major demand driver for mobile broadband, and stimulated further investment in that country’s networks,” read part of the report.

eTransform Africa also documents the flowering of technology hubs across Africa such as iHub and NaiLab in Kenya, Hive CoLab and AppLab in Uganda, Activspaces in Cameroon, BantaLabs in Senegal, and Kinu in Tanzania.

These hubs are creating new spaces for collaboration, innovation, training, applications and content development, and for pre-incubation of African firms.

“Africa is rapidly becoming an ICT leader. Innovations that began in Africa – like dual SIM card mobile phones, or using mobile phones for remittance payments – are now spreading across the continent and beyond.” Tim Kelly, Lead ICT Policy Specialist, World Bank

“The challenge is to ensure that ICT innovations benefit all Africans, including the poor and vulnerable, and those living in remote areas,” he adds.

Share this page