Africa Open Innovation Summit: A Technological Hub Open To The World
During the Africa Open Innovation Summit (AOIS) which was held a few days ago in Abidjan, Africa showed its capacity to innovate both in all basic and production sectors (finance, energy, health, education, transport, agriculture, etc.), taking advantage of the breakthrough in information and communication technologies, in particular mobile. Through this ability to adapt technologies to its context and needs, Africa is now attracting global players in tech. GAFAMs (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), NATUs (Netflix, AirBnb, Tesla, Uber), but also the big tech operators in Asia, BAIDUs (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi) and many other important players in the digital sector of Southeast Asia like the two Indonesian unicorns, Gojek and Tokopedia, which recently merged.
With open innovation, a set of concepts such as: open source, open hardware, open data, open content, open access, interoperability, etc., which are embedded in the “Africa Open innovation Summit” project, they represent the sources of all the dynamics of technological innovation in the world and in Africa for the coming years.
These different companies testify to the strong attractiveness of the African digital market. It is also from this strength that we should be inspired as much as possible to allow African unicorns to shine and take advantage of all these Big Techs on the international scene. Certain African initiatives in Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya or Morocco in particular can rely on these forces in presence to finance themselves, to be hosted (Cloud), to create a thematic niche positioning, to serve millions of users who want to use African products, and all these elements constitute an undeniable strike force which could become the breeding ground for a fully-fledged “Tech Made In Africa Platform”.
In recent years, trade between Singapore and China on the one hand and Africa on the other, has grown steadily as one of the main investors on the continent. Over a hundred Singaporean companies are currently operating in fifty African countries in hydrocarbons, consumer goods, agribusiness, commerce and digital. Nevertheless, the relationship between China and Africa remains structurally asymmetric, more focused on trade and services and and not enough in technology transfer.
The real difficulties in being able to form these partnerships are first access to financing, to the development of R&D and the non-opening of certain technologies for free use because the volume thresholds which allow it, are sometimes too long to reach in Africa.
Lately, a practical initiative that he deserves to cite as an example of this useful cooperation and in the sense of co-development is the one around the “Dunbar” project. Indeed, the central banks of Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa have launched a cross-border payments project using central bank digital currencies (CBDCs for Central Bank Digital Currencies) and which aims to develop “ shared platform protocols for cross-border transactions “.
Nouamane Cherkaoui
