Technologies for Securing Africa

This is an extended version of my opening remarks on a Technologies for Securing Africa panel on 9 February.

Firstly, technology should always be a means to an end. It can help bring in checks and balances, record more and more numbers, news, views and pictures, analyse those so-called big data, make more accurate forecasts, speed processes up – but unless we look under the bonnet at the ‘why’ (why is this the way it is in the first place?), not just the ‘what’, we could end up accelerating leaking or inefficient processes, or allowing the wrong people and organisations to have access to these data.

Secondly, what do we mean by ‘securing Africa’? What are we trying to secure, especially if we don’t have it universally in the first place? Education, employment, trade, wealth, food, energy?

Take university education. As of today, 9 February, Kenyan lecturers are on strike. Likewise in Cameroon.  I have Nigerian colleagues who have taken six years to get a degree. Worse, the teaching material is often out-of-date and research has stagnated or become commercialised. Technology – citation databases, for example – is already addressing parts of the problem.

Zoom in on the quality and relevance of the learning. You can take massive open online courses, or MOOCs, even from prestigious foreign universities. They are typically free. (You can opt to pay for the certification.) Yet MOOCs have had mixed success in Africa, in part due to the poor and expensive Internet. At Makerere University, where the uptake has been low, they have been looking at getting students to register via Facebook.

But, more fundamentally, many degrees across the continent are not designed for the twenty-first century workplace, and the gap will widen if African graduates do not learn basic skills, whether technical or ‘soft’ (empathy, collaboration…) – listen to the BBC World Service’s ‘Will Your Children Have a Job?’ for a discussion on jobs in a world of growing automation.

As a result, companies are either having to fill the gap or are not expanding because it is too hard. These graduates are also not ready to set up their own businesses, and create jobs.

So how about introducing degrees which require online studying and mentoring and paid industrial experience?  (It is a proven model in the west.) Since Africa’s most urgent gaps are in STEM, have a laser-sharp focus on

·     software development (to drive robots)

·     renewable energy (1 in 50 new jobs in the US in 2016 was in solar power, and wind is the next big thing)

·     medicine (learn about the human body through virtual/augmented reality).

Countries from Cape Verde to Madagascar and Libya to South Africa need a generation of problem-solvers if the continent is to become independent – and secure. Not necessarily as many legal, and certainly not as many marketing and communications, graduates that it is producing. Computers are displacing junior lawyers in assessing the risks in a contract based on previous contracts, learning from mistakes.

Africa should only pick policymakers from those who have such degrees.

Another example. Agriculture. Over ten years ago, when I was with Reuters in India, the company developed Reuters Market Light, one of the first, if not the first, farmer information systems via mobiles. Pre-smartphones, smallholder farmers were able to receive pertinent content in local language for no more than the cost of a daily newspaper, which – at the time – was about 4 rupees (or US￠ 10).

Today, you take for granted that African farmers have access to weather, crop prices etc, and mobile wallets. Their purchasing power can be aggregated so that they have better quality, lower cost inputs. They can even take out loans because financial institutions can access all sorts of data about them.

But is this making citizens more food-secure? How is the continent using both traditional knowledge and modern research to maximize nutrition? How can Africans avoid packaged processed foods? Why does the US have a Global Food Security Act?

Today, volunteers from food companies remotely advise African businesses with the official objective of improving food security, nutrition and economic development and, no doubt, to gain some material benefits, too. I am not necessarily advocating that Africa refuses help. I am merely suggesting that the public and private sector takes the bull elephant by its tusks (and secure it before it disappears).

Then, energy. Lots of pay-as-you-go solar with financing options are serving small-scale domestic needs – but what about using blockchain for trading surplus energy or getting software to manage different power sources and detect the most efficient one? As far as I am aware, these innovations are still coming from overseas, and could secure energy for industry and individuals.

Next, trade. If you are a cross-border trader in the East African Community, you now have access to your rights through a mobile app, so you can defend yourself against the harassment you traditionally experienced. A great micro-solution to a specific siloed challenge.

But is informal trade going to pull Africa out of poverty? How does the continent develop trade in digital services, particularly for women? Globally more women are taking jobs in digital services than traditional non-agricultural employment.

And can (or should) we leverage technology to become a digital society like Estonia? Do we trust our governments enough for them to store and enable access to our cradle-to-grave data?  In Nigeria, there is no single, universal, national identity number, despite (or because of) fragmented attempts.

Look at the Aadhaar biometric identity implementation in India.

The Unique Identity project, as reported by scroll.in, was first marketed as altruistically providing the anonymous poor (especially) with “unique and unimpeachable identities”, albeit on a supposed voluntary basis. Aadhaar would “help the poor prove their existence to the state”, “root out ghosts and duplicates”, and “make corruption and leakages a thing of the past.”

Yet the first chairman of the agency that manages the Aadhaar database, Nandan Nilekani, announced that the project was about creating an “identity platform” on which “apps” were to be built.

This has opened all sorts of questions around privacy, and potentially security.

For Africa to be accountable for its socio-economic development, it needs to grapple seriously with these issues, and not get obsessed about local data centres and local content. Technology has an undeniable role to play in healthcare, industrialisation, nutrition, savings and the rest, as long as Africa owns it.

It is time to raise the bar, not the barrier.