Is Africa ready for a digital future?

out – drones can be deployed to supply critical consumables such as medical supplies or animal vaccines to remote, otherwise inaccessible settlements. This is already happening in Rwanda, where a company called Zipline has operated the world’s only nationalscale drone delivery system since October 2016. As the costs of this technology continue to become even more affordable, so will governments’ capacity to deliver rural healthcare and rapidly stock other consumables increase rapidly.

At the very centre of all these smart technologies is connectivity. The digital connectivity of pretty much everything in our world is an inevitability. This isn’t a phenomenon that’s foreign to people in Africa. On the contrary, where adoption of mobile telephony, for instance, was among the fastest anywhere in the world, it’s not just something Africans are familiar with; it’s something they have innovatively mobilised in their day-to-day activities.

Whereas smartphone payments, for example, are becoming more and more popular in the US, mobile money is old news in Kenya. M-Pesa, the country’s most popular mobile payment service with over 18 million active users, was designed to serve the micro-payment requirements of Africa’s so-called ‘base of the pyramid’, giving anyone with a mobile phone the power to send and receive money at the touch of a button. Now used in 10 countries, M-Pesa processed around six billion transactions in 2016. It’s just one example of Africans using connectivity innovatively to better service the pyramid base. It’s suggested that M-Pesa’s mobile money services have lifted 2% of Kenyan households out of poverty.

If connectivity is now an intrinsic part of life across Africa, this is especially pronounced amongst the continent’s youth: digital natives that use connected technologies intuitively. The concept of a ‘digital twin’ is one that most people experience every day on their smartphone. It’s therefore not a huge stretch to understand that a ‘thing’, such as some sort of industrial device, too, could have a digital twin through which it can be controlled, monitored and analysed. With this massive latent potential of digitally savvy people in Africa, is Africa not more likely to become a digital giant than a manufacturing one? Africa’s digital natives are ready for the digital era; the question is how do we skill and educate people to make them employable, how we can enable them to develop the skill sets that will facilitate their meaningful participation in this new digital economy?

One way is by using smart technologies in innovative ways that are increasing the potential for learning. For example, application- and industry-specific experiential learning platforms that make use of virtual and augmented reality to accurately simulate actual plant and production processes. Hypothetical production issues, such as bottlenecks or unplanned equipment downtime, can be re-created with lifelike accuracy in a virtual environment, and which demand analytical and problem-solving skills to correct the issue. Such experiential learning environments are potential gamechangers for training and up-skilling the youth in Africa.

What is critical is that we understand what the fundamental purpose of connectivity is. Connectivity ensures our ability to collect data; analyse it through data science, AI, machine learning and even reinforcement learning; and finally, transform it into actionable intelligence that can create new value for humans.

While the most labour-intensive and dangerous tasks will continue to be replaced by automated machines that improve the efficiency and productivity of industrial output, so will digital technologies create new opportunities amongst Africa’s digital natives for whom connectivity is such a fundamental part of life.

Our opportunity as Africans – individuals, organisations and governments – lies in our innovativeness in how we can use new technologies in disruptive ways, a need to innovate driven often by basic necessity. This is how countries in Africa should be thinking about their industrial futures.— miningreview. com

Mr Ncube said the survey would also extend to cover undeveloped stands. He said the delay in processing the title deeds was caused by the residents’ initial refusal to contribute money for survey fees.

Ward councillor, Edward Nkomo said the move was a welcome development .

“The major challenge in acquiring the title deeds was finance. Council said they didn’t have the money to finance the process. At one point they approached the residents to contribute but they refused. Now that the residents have agreed to pay, we hope it will not be long before they get the title deeds,” he said.