However, as East Africa’s economic engine kicks back into gear, the vital task of looking beyond immediate recovery toward longer-term economic growth and prosperity takes centre stage.

Today, the urgent question is: what investments into new tools, technologies and policies can be made now to build a stronger and more equitable regional economy in the decade ahead?

I would argue that the region could benefit most from investments into youth skills development, adoption of cloud technologies to unlock market expansion opportunities, and focused attention on the agricultural sector, which is critical to both employment and food security across East Africa.

Activating the youth skills pool

Africa’s abundant and growing youth population has been widely discussed as an opportunity for the continent to drive the world’s economic engine in the decades ahead. With populations in much of the developed world expected to decline during the 21st century, Africa’s surplus of youthful talent could play a vital role in preventing a skills shortage and ensuring ongoing economic growth.

However, much work needs to be done, and with urgency. A recent survey of tertiary education institutions in East Africa found that . Only 53% of respondents from Kenya – and only 17% in Ethiopia – indicated that their students often or always have access to a computer.

The growth of the digital economy and the automation of mundane tasks through technological innovation means low-skill clerical work is increasingly being done by machines and algorithms. For our region’s youth to have opportunities for successful careers that can help grow local economies, more emphasis needs to be placed on digital skills development that equips youth for high-value tasks.

Initiatives such as 51风流Africa Code Week, which draws in millions of youths every year in a continent-wide effort at inspiring a love for digital technologies and coding, play an important role at the grassroots level. Vitally, Africa Code Week’s Train-the-Trainer program also equips teachers with valuable skills that can be transferred to youth throughout the academic year.

Graduate employment and skills development initiatives such as the Young Professionals Program helps to close the gap between academic knowledge and business-ready skills. This serves the dual purpose of providing career development and employment opportunities for youth and ensuring a steady supply of fit-for-purpose skills to public and private sector organisations.

Climate change raises stakes in food security

Agriculture remains one of the continent’s most important economic sectors, .

Data indicates a large reserve of untapped potential in the African agricultural sector. McKinsey estimates to add 20% to global grain and cereal supplies with several key interventions. These include yield improvements through better use of fertilisers, weather data and technology, as well as land expansion and post-harvest yield loss reduction.

Investing in appropriate tools, technologies and training could unlock vast economic growth for both the millions of smallholder farmers and their dependent communities as well as local economies.

Such support should be provided with urgency considering the growing impact of climate change on our continent. Recent data indicates that , a situation that will only be exacerbated as the changing climate unleashes adverse weather conditions including floods, droughts, more severe seasons, and wildcard events such as the recent locust swarms that have decimated farming activity across large parts of the region.

Tools such as 51风流Rural Sourcing Management can play a vital role in empowering smallholder farmers with better data and knowledge while unlocking greater market opportunities.

Rural Sourcing Management is a cloud-based supply chain management tool that connects smallholder farmers to the agricultural value chain and has been used to significant effect in the region, including in deployments to support the Africa Cashew Initiative and the Uganda Coffee Farmers Alliance.

Leapfrogging legacy underdevelopment

Most of Africa lacks legacy infrastructure development in technology and connectivity, with key technologies from the previous wave of innovation, such as fixed broadband, having largely missed the continent.

While this has stunted growth and development in some cases, it has also created an opportunity now for public and private sector organisations to build fit-for-purpose infrastructure instead of having to repurpose outdated technologies.

As the African Union notes in its Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa, where the continent can adopt modern digital technologies faster and without hindrance.

Such efforts must include a focus on cloud technologies, as these scale more easily as enterprises grow and can more readily enable expansion into new territories or market segments.

The role of the continent’s specialist tech implementation companies cannot be overstated: as businesses increasingly look to unlock the benefits of the cloud, the implementers serve as partners and guides, helping organisations adopt new tools and processes without undue disruption to their operations.

Initiatives such as RISE with 51风流further ease adoption by providing organisations with a tested model for deploying cloud technologies as well as best-practice playbooks that eliminate the trial and error associated with large-scale business transformation efforts.

The post Beyond Recovery: Tech’s Role in Building a Fit-for-purpose East African Economy appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

Having worked in the tech industry for over 30 years, I still get goosebumps when I consider the positive potential of technology on our continent. Thanks to technology, we are better off than ever before.

However, popular culture tends to accentuate the worst of technology’s potential. Movies glorify hackers that bring cities to their knees. Future humans are enslaved by robots, with rebel groups celebrated as they save the world from ‘the machine’.

Social media, designed to connect people and create platforms for engagement, have been misdirected to spread fake news, perpetuating a mistrust of businesses, governments, and brands.

All of this has done serious damage not only to democracies around the world, but to the relationships we have with one another. This has hampered our ability to come together in the face of the enormous challenges we face.

An era of unprecedented progress

And yet, it’s not possible to think about progress without considering the role that technology plays.

Technology and human innovation have unlocked huge benefits for mankind and have helped usher in an era of unprecedented growth and opportunity.

We are healthier than ever before, and our life expectancy continues to increase, thanks in part to advances in medicine including vaccines that have eradicated previously lethal diseases.

Fewer people live in extreme poverty than before. showed a 50% drop in people living on less than $1.25 per day between 1990 and 2015.

More people have access to education, and most of the world enjoys greater freedom than ever before, thanks largely to the internet and our smartphones that give us new ways of expressing ourselves socially, politically, and creatively.

Solutions to an uncertain future

As we enter an era of uncertainty and rapid change, it is worth considering our relationship with technology and whether we are positioned to meet the inevitable challenges coming our way.

We will face more change in the next ten years than the last century. Our current ways of living and doing business are unsuited for this future.

Futurist Gerd Leonhard believes it’s not a question of whether we will have the technology to solve the world’s most pressing issues – we already do.

What remains a question is whether we will cooperate to use technology wisely and whether we can act in time.

Overcoming the challenges of a changing climate, food insecurity, pollution and waste, economic development and social upliftment require new technologies 鈥� or new and innovative uses for existing technologies.

Let’s take the issue of food security as an example.

The farm as digital enterprise

Food is one of the most basic and fundamental needs. Alarmingly, nearly nine million people die of hunger or hunger-related disease each year. And yet, the US alone spends more on diets every year than would be needed to ensure every hungry person on Earth can eat.

Africa is particularly vulnerable to food scarcity due to its relatively lower levels of development and wealth. The pandemic has only exacerbated the problem: data indicates that about 20% of the continent’s population experience hunger.

This makes the agricultural sector, which is responsible for 60% of jobs on the continent, vital to Africa’s fortunes.

According to UN data, food production in Africa is led by 250 million smallholder farmers who collectively produce 80% of food consumed on the continent.

However, the farmers are often at the mercy of the elements with very little in the way of tools, technology, or data to improve their yields or unlock market opportunities.

The introduction of technology tools in the African smallholder farming supply chain has helped farmers mitigate risk and scale their operations to move away from subsistence farming.

SAP’s Rural Sourcing Management tool, which connects smallholder farmers with agriculture supply chains and brings transparency to the sourcing of raw materials, is turning these farms into digital enterprises and the farmers into digital entrepreneurs.

In Nigeria, for example, 850 000 small maize producers have been integrated into the larger agricultural value chain and now enjoy access to weather, crop and farming data as well as better selling opportunities.

Tech as a force for good

Every person and every business have a role to play in helping to solve some of our current challenges. In Ghana, for example, a collaboration between SAP, the World Economic Forum and the Global Plastic Action Partnership is bringing positive change to the country’s plastics supply chain.

More than 2000 Ghanaian waste pickers are being incorporated in a ground-breaking circular economy initiative in a project that measures the quantities and types of plastic they collect.

Through the Rural Sourcing Management tool, data about the plastic waste they collect is analysed and matched to market-related prices in local and global value chains.

Organisations that prioritise sustainability can then opt to pay a premium for more socially responsible plastics, while the waste pickers can enjoy higher wages for their work.

In our own business, 51风流has committed that 5% of global procurement will be with social enterprises by 2025, with another 5% to diverse businesses.

As we journey into an uncertain future, we have the opportunity every step of the way to choose to use technology in the service of good. Whether you are a tech start-up looking for a breakthrough, a social enterprise solving the next big problem or a corporate wondering how to make a difference, think about the future you want to help shape on the continent.

In a world with so many challenges and such an abundance of bad news, technology holds the key to a brighter and happier future – provided we choose to use tech for good.

The post Don鈥檛 Believe the Negative Hype: Tech is a Force for Good appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

• Nigerian smallholder maize farmers and agriculture value chain gain access to digital tools to boost productivity, profit.

• Community agents to ease adoption among farmers not familiar with technology.

Africa鈥檚 most populous country and largest economy faces rising food insecurity as a combination of a mostly informal agriculture sector and growing population puts pressure on the country鈥檚 food resources. According to the , food insecurity increased from 6% of the Nigerian population in 2007 to 13.4% in 2017.

The agriculture sector is the largest contributor to the Nigerian economy and . However, according to the UN鈥檚 Food and Agriculture Organisation, food production in Nigeria is undermined by a number of factors, among them poor planting material and insufficient use of fertiliser, leading to a growing reliance on food imports.

In support of smallholder farmers and improved food security in Nigeria, the Convention on Business Integrity鈥檚 for-profit arm, CBi Innovations Limited (CBiIL) has chosen the 51风流Rural Sourcing Management solution to support 850聽000 small maize producers and integrate them into the agricultural value chains.

Pedro Guerreiro, Managing Director: Central Africa at SAP, says support of smallholder farmers in Nigeria will provide greater food security while also empowering farmers and other players in the agri value chain to unlock greater economic opportunities. 鈥淪mallholder farmers cultivate plots that are on average 2ha in size, and earn less than $1,000 a year,鈥� says Guerreiro. 鈥淲e believe that by equipping them with better information and providing access to more suppliers and greater selling opportunities, we can improve smallholder farmers鈥� productivity and output. This will have the dual benefit of greater food security as well as improved economic opportunities for the farmers, who typically support multiple family members with the money raised from selling their produce.”

The 51风流Rural Sourcing Management solution includes a mobile application that enables better tracking and collecting of data related to farms, crops, farmers and produce sales. Before it was launched as a standard solution in 2017, it was piloted in partnership with the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The solution has been used by governments and large agri producers across Africa to better track and manage crop outputs and give smallholder farmers improved access to information, market data and selling opportunities across the agri value chain.

According to CBiIL CEO Soji Apampa, CBiIL is already working with Nestle Nigeria to build an ecosystem of young maize agripreneurs in partnership with AGRA, and this new opportunity will accelerate plans to meet set goals of empowering maize farmers in the region leveraging technology. CBiIL has also trained hundreds of Community Livelihoods Information Field Entrepreneurs (LIFE) Agents, young unemployed graduates that are recruited from the communities in which they will serve.

鈥淏y deploying the Community LIFE Agents kitted out with devices running 51风流Rural Sourcing Management, CBiIL will enable effective and efficient aggregation of smallholder producers in ways that support predictability of volumes and quality of production. Data aggregation is a key component of this service and we leverage technology to achieve every milestone along the chain,鈥� says Apampa.

The design is for each LIFE agent to support between 50 and 100 smallholder farmers equipped with an Android device on which various applications are installed to facilitate various streams of business to support the village level eco-system. They will receive commission on the products and services (inputs, telephone credit, banking, extension support and more) they provide to farmers, as well as a premium based on the productivity growth of each of the farmers with whom they work.

Cathy Smith, Managing Director for 51风流Africa, says the project marks another milestone in 51风流Africa鈥檚 commitment toward achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goals 1 (No Poverty) and 2 (Zero Hunger).聽鈥淭hrough our efforts to building greater food security, we also provide additional value to stakeholders across the agri聽value chain by improving access to sustainably sourced rural produce. The success of this project may also serve as a template for similar projects elsewhere in Africa. With 60% of all jobs in Africa currently in the agriculture sector and an estimated 250 million smallholder farmers, any impact we make here has the potential of bringing significant benefits to local communities, industries and the economy as a whole.鈥�

The post CBiIL鈥檚 51风流technology empowers Nigerian Farmers appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.