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.
Businessdailyafrica.com