Business
Six astounding ways Africa is paving the Way for the future of technology
What Africa makes, it will inevitably export, the same way Germany gave us SoundCloud or Israel gave us Waze. In fact, it is already happening.
A WiFi device called BRCK that was made at an African tech incubator has been used to patch up dead spots in Wisconsin. A system called Ushahidi – a crowdsourcing platform that was used to track incidences of violence around elections in Nigeria – has been used by the Washington Post to track snow cleanup, and by the Huffington Post to monitor election polling. That is to say nothing of the potential for African innovations to spread to other parts of the developing world, which deal with similar problems and have similarly mobile-focused societies.
And that’s not all they will export and Africa becomes more connected. “Innovation isn’t just in tech,” Hruby said. “There is innovation in culture.”
The authors of The Next Africa: An Emerging Continent Becomes a Global Powerhouse believe that the natural conclusion of Africa becoming an innovation hub is that it brings us closer to African culture, literature, fashion and media.
“You are going to be listening to Nigerian music, and African authors are going to be best-sellers,” Hruby says. “There’s not just a growing integration of African countries for goods and services, but for ideas and cultures as well.”
Jack Smith IV is a blogger and writer, that covers the tech scene and trends. The original version of this article was first published in Mic.
