The Internet is a source of improvement for many and also a curse for many too, like most technologies invented they serve a good and a bad purpose depending on how you handle them. Africa is constantly being suspected or predicted to become the next place after China. China shares a lot in common with Africa.
How can africa be changed without exporting useful models of growth and tailoring them to our own culture, climate and infrastructure? It is impossible to change Africa by inventing a new African rather it would be easier to change Africa and improve it by finding out how other great economies have been able to rise up and conquer. Consider Brazil that has oil like some African countries, look the the technological advances they have made, currently they even manufacture aircrafts for sale there.
In China most of the exports have been done by multinational companies like Apple shipping iPhones from foxconn but at a point in China’s growing phase an entrepreneur started a revolution by looking to what works in the west and making the same to China, today we have Alibaba group one of the biggest e-commerce providers in the world. This step has helped China to sell products that has been manufactured locally to other parts of the world. Even though there are European, African and other Asian manufacturers on their sites but the bulk is still from China.
How then has Africa adopted technologies to solve it’s problems? Why do we wait until this time to start having success stories coming in slowly? There are lots of African online but what are we doing online? Are we selling as we should? Sadly many african startups are still struggling to get traction with their innovations or solutions because we as African’s don’t patronize them enough. How then can they change Africa with their inventions or technological innovations? How can these entrepreneurs build companies that will or can employ thousands of Africans without them having so much money to invest in marketing?
Take a look at the movie industry and the music industry, they are thriving because of patronage and the contents are local. When will our technological innovations become good enough that we Africans will support them to change Africa? Look at the typical Western entrepreneur who starts from scratch to make things, they get faster traction because of the support by families, friends, well wishers. We also have millions of Africans online but do we understand the need to support African technologies? Do we know why it is important to give feedback and help make recommendations? Do we even understand how we can make seed and angel investments to help these young entrepreneurs without thinking they are out to steal or beg from you?
No government will ever be help to help the people to the extents which we depend on them for, instead we African ought to change out minds to realize that without supporting financially(investing), without adopting African technologies these crazy, bold entrepreneurs will not be encouraged to come up with ideas that can change our Africa.
Just like Jack Ma saw the need and created Alibaba, I myself as an entrepreneur have realized that there needs to be an avenue to get credible business connections in Africa with Ziliot business network with B2B marketplace www.ziliot.com but to tell you the truth I dreaded the thoughts of localizing it just because I turn around the internet and see poor adoption of web based technologies and this question arose, how will you reach them when you don’t have a huge budget to advertise on newspapers?
Many African entrepreneurs are facing and will continue to face such challenges even when millions of African are using the internet , the change needed can only come from within.
Author Bio: Aniekan Okono is a Nigerian living in Finland, he cofounded Ziliot business discovery network www.ziliot.com to enable credible African, Middle-Eastern manufacturers to found. Ziliot has a b2b marketplace and also features to create public pages for companies that don’t have presence online.
Tags: Africa Technology, African TechnologySource : techtalkafrica[dot]com
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