Focused at first on ensuring business continuity, investment into cloud technologies and digitalisation has since helped organisations in the region build greater resilience and unlock new business models and revenue streams.

Even the most reluctant businesses and their customers have now come online. One of the reasons is that the benefits of greater digitalisation became clear almost immediately.

Businesses that took the opportunity at the outset to build new capabilities, establish new revenue streams or transform their business models rapidly gained an advantage over those that were slower to transform.

Consider how the retail sector embraced technology to adapt to lockdown restrictions and reach customers, sell products and improve visibility over volatile supply chains. Many of the businesses that digitised with speed now enjoy the benefit of more resilient business models that are better suited to the demands of the modern economy.

Cloud at heart of region’s future success

For businesses across East Africa, the cloud presents a unique opportunity to innovate, develop new products and services, and scale into new markets or geographies.

Cloud technologies offer access to services and capabilities that are prohibitively costly for most companies to build themselves. By adopting cloud solutions for key business processes, organisations can drive greater efficiency and optimise their business processes without the upfront capital outlay of on-premise solutions.

Taking advantage of the wealth of cloud-based ‘as-a-service’ solutions can also augment internal capabilities and unlock access to supplier networks, tech skills and other capabilities that were previously out of reach.

Many businesses have experienced the benefits of such services when the first lockdowns created the need to enable remote work capabilities. By leveraging cloud technologies, businesses could maintain communication with teams and customers and ensure continuity. Today, cloud technologies play a central role in transforming how organisations measure, manage and motivate their hybrid workforce.

As the ripple effects of the pandemic travelled through the global economy, businesses turned to cloud technologies to improve visibility over their supply chains and assist with planning and risk mitigation. When a different, post-pandemic customer emerged, one that demanded greater personalisation, convenience and choice, organisations could once again leverage the power of cloud technologies to enable new ways of engagement with customers.

Once-in-a-generation opportunity

Now, the region faces a golden opportunity to drive innovation and achieve new gains across their internal and customer-facing operations by leveraging the cloud.

revealed that some East African industries have taken the lead with cloud adoption, including the banking, marketing, agriculture and education sectors.

Considering the importance of manufacturing and tourism to the regional economy, organisations operating in these industries should leap at the opportunity to digitise.

Business-to-business spending in Africa’s manufacturing sector , and the sector is well-placed to grow and become more competitive through digitisation. By building Industry 4.0 capabilities underpinned by the cloud, manufacturers could unlock the benefits of AI and robotic process automation with predictive analytics to gain unprecedented control, predictability and operational efficiency.

The tourism sector was one of the hardest hit by pandemic restrictions as international travel came to a total standstill at the peak of the pandemic. Considering the sector contributed 8.1% to the region’s GDP in 2019, the impact of the restrictions on local businesses could not be overstated.

By leveraging the cloud to build new ways of engaging with travellers and removing friction from the travel process, the tourism sector could tap into a global tourism sector hungry for new experiences.

Three focus areas for cloud success

Businesses will benefit from choosing priority areas for cloud deployment that can deliver the greatest benefit with the shortest time-to-value, and use the learnings to drive adoption in other areas of the business.

Based on our work helping organisations in East Africa leverage the cloud for business success, the following key focus areas could offer the most valuable starting points for cloud adoption:

1. Innovate, innovate, innovate

East Africa can benefit from greater investment into innovation and research and development to improve the region’s global competitiveness and lure foreign direct investment.

The pharmaceutical sector, for example, holds enormous potential for research and development initiatives that can drive economic growth and create new industries while also reducing our need to import product and service innovations.

Regional innovators could consider to leverage the experience and market insight of cloud service providers with experience supporting pharmaceutical innovation. This can help avoid costly mistakes, close the gap on best practice, and ensure there is an optimal technology mix to support innovation. As an example, 18 of the world’s 20 largest vaccine manufacturers run their production facilities using 51·çÁ÷technology, so any new facility can tap into SAP’s domain knowledge to fast-track success.

2. Remove uncertainty from decision-making

The continued volatility in the global economy has created an environment of uncertainty that is hampering growth and innovation. To remove some of this uncertainty, organisations should invest in enterprise resource planning solutions to achieve greater clarity and control over key business functions and core processes.

Cloud adoption can also unlock access to data and analytics capabilities that can empower decision-makers with accurate insights over their businesses, enabling them to guide the business through challenges more effectively.

3. Aim for speed

One of the greatest advantages cloud offers is speed. Instead of spending long periods of time building on-premise capabilities, businesses can readily tap into a wealth of cloud-based solutions to immediately enjoy efficiency and innovation gains.

For mid-market organisations, this could unlock opportunities to quickly test new digital channels and trial new business processes. Successful trials can be rapidly scaled to the rest of the business or to new geographies, powering their growth.

The post Cloud, Innovation Key to East Africa’s Economic Growth appeared first on 51·çÁ÷Africa News Center.

Countries across East Africa are breathing a sigh of relief as pandemic-related challenges finally ease and the prospect of some form of normalcy emerges.

While the region avoided the worst of the health-related impacts of the pandemic, , and .

The impact of the pandemic has prompted renewed calls for a transformation of East African economies to better suit the challenges and opportunities in the global economy.

However, the latest  by the Brookings Institute points out that a lack of investment in science and technology has hampered Africa’s economic transformation at a structural and sectoral level, and stifled innovation.

But following a two-year period of disruption, the region has an opportunity to rebuild in a way that not only aids its economic recovery but also establishes a powerful foundation for the region’s growth over the coming decades.

Three vital sectors could hold the key to how well the region recovers over the coming years, namely manufacturing, tourism, and pharmaceutical.

Considering the important economic role that manufacturing plays in East Africa, investments into technologies that can foster greater global competitiveness in the region’s manufacturing sector could unlock much of this potential to the benefit of East African economies.

The focus should be on building Industry 4.0 capabilities that bring together next-generation technologies – such as artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, Industrial Internet-of-Things and predictive analytics – integrated to an intelligent core that can bring unprecedented control, predictability and efficiency to manufacturing operations.

Aspects such as quality control, plant consumption and energy management, smart warehousing, factory asset intelligence and overall performance management can be transformed with Industry 4.0 capabilities. Integrating manufacturing facilities with digital supply chains could further help alleviate some of the present challenges with the global supply chain and bring greater stability to manufacturing operations.

In a recent global study, 21% of manufacturers said they , while 19% cited productivity improvements of more than 10%.

As the region reboots a manufacturing sector vital to its economic prospects, smart investment into Industry 4.0 technologies could help the sector accelerate its growth and boost its global competitiveness.

Special attention, however, must be paid to developing innovative supply chain solutions, especially considering the global supply chain crunch that has seen shortages of goods in markets around the world.

Any efforts at digitising the manufacturing value chain through Industry 4.0 technologies must include interventions and innovations that bring greater transparency and predictability to the supply chain.

Pharmaceutical sector: closing the R&D gap

Research and development initiatives hold the potential of unlocking tremendous economic advantages and stimulating foreign direct investment.

However, Africa lags far behind the more developed nations in their R&D spending, with the result that the majority of product and service innovations driving African economies stem from outside the continent.

This R&D gap and lack of local capacity was on full display during the early stages of the pandemic when Africa’s lack of local pharmaceutical production and manufacturing capacity left most of the continent without access to life-saving vaccines.

Policymakers and industry leaders should look at the opportunities for greater regional investment into R&D and draw on international best practices. For example, 18 of the world’s 20 largest vaccine producers run their production facilities using 51·çÁ÷technologies, so local production facilities could draw on learnings from their global peers to avoid costly mistakes and fast-track success.

As with the manufacturing sector, pharmaceutical companies should support investment into digital transformation with efforts at gaining greater visibility over their supply chain.

While it is unlikely the pandemic will disrupt the global supply chain as it has over the past two years, other disruptive events are bound to emerge. Investing in tools that bring predictability to the supply chain will enable pharmaceutical companies to more easily adapt to further disruptions.

Tourism sector: safely opening the doors to international visitors

Prior to the pandemic, the tourism sector was a key economic driver for East African countries and .

However, travel restrictions implemented to help curb the spread of COVID-19 in the region resulted in losses of 92% of tourism revenues, with arrivals dropping sharply from seven million in 2019 to little over two million in 2020. Further global travel restrictions as a result of the Omicron variant have only compounded the losses.

With Western countries now lifting many of their travel bans – and in some cases removing all mandated restrictions – East Africa needs to urgently work to re-establish the region as a prime tourist destination.

The introduction of the , which integrates the testing and vaccination data of regional countries could help ease movement across East Africa and stimulate greater tourism industry revenues.

Using digital technologies to remove some of the friction inherent in post-lockdown international travel could further encourage international arrivals, while innovation in tourism experiences built on technological innovation could turn the region into a test case for how countries attract tourists in the year ahead.

The post Three East Africa Economic Sectors Ripe for Tech Innovation appeared first on 51·çÁ÷Africa News Center.