Accelerating growth in Africa: the role of technology and innovation

Saliu Olumide Saheed

In a blog post at the later part of 2018 written and published by the Brookings Institute it was asserted that 70 per cent of the world's poorest people live in Africa. Also, 27 out of the 28 world's poorest countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, while 1 in 3 Africans lives below the global poverty line. For a continent endowed with numerous natural resources, as well as a swelling population that can provide all the human capacities needed to turn these resources into beneficial products with maximum utilities, the above statistics are very humiliating. But this is not a recent trend. 

Africa has been synonymous with penury for a long time. We could claim that the Europeans and their supremacist's activities during the colonial era darkened our ways and underdeveloped our continent. But the years of colonialism have passed. We now rule ourselves, work our destiny and decide our future. It is no longer sane to point fingers. Rather, we must look inward for solutions and most importantly; we must look towards science, innovation and technology. 

The journalist Meredith wrote in his terrific book, Born in Africa that "Africa does not give up her secrets easily". Anyone who has ever thought about the continent really hard will be confronted with the truism of that statement in every sphere of the African life. Up to the most recent discoveries in paleontology, coupled with the myriads of archaeological evidence, which demonstrated that the first humans to have ever existed, lived in Africa, it would have been impossible to suggest that. But we now know that they do.

African hunter-gatherers apparently formed the first human communities to waddle the surface of Africa. They were unprotected from the brute forces of nature. At that time, lots of lives were lost from using taste to discern which plants were edible and those who weren't. Since there was no form of medicine, Individuals were more susceptible to diseases and plagues than ever, and with shelter and accommodation not being a real necessity, it follows that people were attacked by beast, cold, extreme heat and lightning when it rains. The list of their perilous situations can go on and on to show how vulnerable and helpless their situation was. Such was their condition until a major revolution happened.

In line with the Israeli Jewish professor of history, Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote in his magnum opus Sapiens that "Humans rose to a significant organism because of three revolutions". The cognitive revolution (which is immaterial to our case), the Agricultural revolution and the scientific revolution. Our cognitive revolution was uncaused since it was guided by the blind hand of natural selection, while the Agricultural revolution was a fruit of our hands. It is the basis of all civilization. It taught us all an important lesson, which is the fact that we can innovate and produce a technological product to solve most of our problems. From the crude practice and subsistence agriculture came the plough, came the hoes, giant knives, giant silos and even pyramids. We eventually had a civilization, one, whose light shone upon the whole world and became a model for other distant people to learn from. And they did learn!

Western civilization boomed. The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th century took place on their soil. More than ever, the miraculous method of solving problems and innovating useful technologies was born. Antibiotics were discovered, the train was invented, the thread mill, electricity, standardized printing press, the television, the transistor radio, space satellites for communications, dynamite, nuclear energy and radioactivity.  Within a short period, they had a series of industrial revolutions and even exported their technologies elsewhere. Africa on the other hand, relented from their core values and methods to engage in frivolities. The resulting situations were ravaging.  Slowly, the civilization and glamorous Africa we've once created, decayed and deteriorated on our own eyes.

Innovation, as it occurred to me, is the production or transformation of materials and ideas to solve human problems. When these new ideas are in the form of materials, they can be called technology, and science is the tool by which these endeavors are carried out.  When human problems are solved and diminished, A country progresses. When a country progresses, it can be said to have grown. To accelerate growth in Africa will be to tighten our relationship with science and our human capacities to innovate.  We have arranged things in such a way that to distant ourselves from innovation and technologies is to be silent about our problems and in the not too distant time, such a mixture of complacency and delinquency is bound to explode. We can only hope such an explosion will not tear Africa upon itself. 

In our fervor for accelerated growth. Africa needs to first ameliorate themselves from their culture of total dependency and take responsibility for their problems. Political answers and policies are never enough. In almost all developed countries, science, innovation and technologies are the vehicles that drive all their sustainable development programs. To improve our food security, get clean water, provide maximum communications, energy for all industries, modern and efficient health care, good quality of life and high standard of living, everything all depends on our investment and the extent to which our technology can cater for us. Maybe there is nothing wrong with buying technologies, maybe there is even nothing wrong in sending students to other countries and learning how to make some of these things. One fact still remains very certain, it is almost impossible to progress as a nation without innovation and technology. Even as egregious as it is that science can fascinate us all, only technology and innovation can "give us a new world.”