Title: Engineering change in Africa: Facing urgent needs, African nations are pioneering new technologies - [Spectral Lines]
Abstract:By 2022, forecasters estimate that sub-Saharan Africa will have nearly 1 billion mobile phones-enough for the vast majority of the projected 1.2 billion people who will live there. What it won't have ...By 2022, forecasters estimate that sub-Saharan Africa will have nearly 1 billion mobile phones-enough for the vast majority of the projected 1.2 billion people who will live there. What it won't have are the endless streams of telephone poles and wires that cascade across other continents. Development experts call this an example of a "leapfrog technology." By going straight to mobile, many African nations will be able to skip the step of building extensive and expensive landline infrastructure. In fact, "some places will go straight to 5G," says Vincent Kaabunga, chair of the IEEE Ad Hoc Committee on Africa, which has helped craft IEEE's strategy to increase engineering capacity on the continent. With this kind of leapfrogging, African nations can take the lead in certain types of technological development and deployment, he says. Just look at mobile money: Companies such as M-Pesa sprang up to solve a local problem-people's lack of access to brick-and-mortar banks-and became a way for people not only to make payments, but also to get loans and insurance. "We've refined the concept of mobile money over the last 10 or 15 years," says Kaabunga, "while other parts of the world are just now coming around to embracing it." IEEE and its members in Africa are facilitating the application of new technologies by promoting education and access, says Kaabunga, who also works for a technology consulting firm in Kampala, Uganda. The IEEE in Africa Strategy, launched in 2017, calls for IEEE to support engineering education at every level and to advise government policymakers, efforts that Kaabunga and his colleagues in the region have already begun. For example, they're currently working with the Smart Africa alliance, an initiative that aims to create standard policies for information and communications technology to enable a single digital marketplace across the continent.Read More