The CEO of Telecel Ghana, Ing. Patricia Obo-Nai has stated that partnerships for the establishment and deployment of digital public infrastructure, sustained investment in start-up innovations to scale, and well-crafted digital literacy programs to drive digital adoption across the continent are a panacea to accelerating Africa’s development through digital innovation.
She was delivering the first keynote address at the Mobile Technology for Development (MT4D) forum as part of the just-ended 3i Africa Summit in Accra.
The Telecel Ghana CEO spoke on the theme “Digital Infrastructure and Innovation: Accelerating Africa’s Development”.
She observed that the post Covid-19 period has provided African countries with a great opportunity to build resilient, fair and inclusive digital infrastructure to bridge the yawning connectivity and accessibility gap on the continent.
According to her, the GSMA 2023 Report on internet connectivity in Sub-Saharan Africa indicates only 25% of Africans are connected to the internet, while 15% do not even have coverage; 59% have coverage but have no connectivity, and 40% of that figure do not have the needed devices to get connected, even though they live in places where there is coverage.
Patricia Obo-Nai however noted that the infrastructure need to close the connectivity gap is not just mobile coverage, but includes fibre (inland and undersea), data centres, and even more critically reliable energy, which is often not mentioned in the equation.
“It is also important that we have resilient and future proof infrastructure to prevent the kind of outage we experienced recently when the undersea cables were damages,” said.
Partnerships
She said whereas individual operators like Telecel and others are doing their bit in building and deploying the needed infrastructure, “the only way we can close the gap effectively is co-investing and infrastructure sharing.”
She noted that the World Bank estimates that Africa will need US$109 billion to close the digital infrastructure gap by 2030, saying that no one operator or government can do it alone without partnership.
“Where is the money going to come from as private investment is stalling, foreign donors are localizing their funding to their home countries and African governments’ budgets are also tightening. Broad partnerships between governments and private sector players is the way to go,” she said.
Supporting start-up innovations to scale Â
Patricia Obo-Nai noted that Africa presents that largest untapped potential in digital innovation in the world, as the World Bank again estimates that Africa’s digital economy is poised to reach US$180 billion by 2025.
She said the challenge now is that, even though Africa has some of the most brilliant minds when it comes to fintech innovations, a lot of those innovations are unable to scale due to lack of investment.
“We are good at creating tech start-ups, which is great but I am tired of family and friends funding such startups. We need to harness talents and invest heavily in them to scale so that we can ride on the back of those innovations to accelerate our development,” she said.
Driving Adoption and Inclusivity
Patricia Obo-Nai also noted that the third piece of the puzzle would be to drive adoption and usage of the innovation across the continent to solve the inclusivity challenge.
She noted that the World Bank estimates that by 2035, Africa’s working population will reach 450 million with just a small percentage holding stable employment.
According to her, great opportunities exist in digital innovation to close the expected unemployment gap, but that would require a deliberate and consistent rollout of digital literacy programs like coding, digital marketing, data analytics, machine learning and others to provide the African youth with the necessary digital skills that will make them employable in the future.
“Let’s not just discuss these issues – let’s implement, implement and implement – and we need to do this with speed – that is the only way we can realize the desired accelerated development,” Patricia Obo-Nai stated.
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