Business
How the Data Revolution Can Benefit Africa
Maybe, or maybe not, but it isn’t necessary to have a grand plan to give it a go. It is already natural to use data and communication to solve real world problems. In Silicon Valley these are the challenges of getting a taxi or reserving a restaurant. In Africa they are often more fundamental. John Quinn has been in Kampala, Uganda at Makerere University for eight years now targeting these challenges. In June this year, John and other researchers from across the region came together for Africa’s first workshop on data science at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology. The objective was to spread knowledge of technologies, ideas and solutions. For the modern information infrastructure to be successful software solutions need to be locally generated. African apps to solve African problems. With this in mind the workshop began with a three day summer school on data science which was then followed by two days of talks on challenges in African data science.
The ideas and solutions presented were cutting edge. The Umati project uses social media to understand the use of ethnic hate speech in Kenya (Sidney Ochieng, iHub, Nairobi). The use of social media for monitoring the evolution and effects of Ebola in west Africa (Nuri Pashwani, IBM Research Africa). The Kudu system for market making in Ugandan farm produce distribution via SMS messages (Kenneth Bwire, Makerere University, Kampala). Telecommunications data for inferring the source and spread of a typhoid outbreak in Kampala (UN Pulse Lab, Kampala). The Punya system for prototyping and deployment of mobile phone apps to deal with emerging crises or market opportunities (Julius Adebayor, MIT) and large scale systems for collating and sharing data resources Open Data Kenya and UN OCHA Human Data Exchange.
The workshop showed that there’s a new strand of thinking emerging: modern infrastructure solving the challenges of missing infrastructure. The solutions would be leading edge in any country, but across Africa’s countries they can be simpler to implement because they don’t need to be built on top of a legacy system. Imagine a distributed health system which relies on mobile phones for access to the health record. The hardware infrastructure in Africa would already support this, the investment has already been made. It is the investment in people and ideas that is now needed.
Many new dawns have been promised for Africa, but so far they seem to have been false. One possible reason for this is that they involved top down imposition of a developed European country’s centralized economy onto the African model. The Data Science in Africa workshop showed that the information revolution can be locally driven to develop the modern infrastructure that Africa needs.
The Guardian Copyright 2015
