Africa isn’t ready for Fourth Industrial Revolution

I believe that the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) cannot be relevant to Africa unless African thinkers delve deep into how we should best apply it to our situation.

Thus, I was happy to read a recent paper authored by the founder of mPedigree, Mr Bright Simons.

DEVELOP POLICIES

The paper, A Farewell to Disruption in a Post-Platform World, published by the Centre for Global Development (a Washington DC-based think-tank), affirmed my concerns about how countries like Kenya, and Africa as a whole, can seriously press forward with their plans and not be left behind by the latest industrial revolution after missing the previous three.

The biggest of these concerns is that 4IR concepts in common use are often too broad and many of the narratives fail to account for low-level trends we are all observing around us.

The plight of African start-ups in many industries provide us with clear evidence of how hard it is for society, and especially governments, to take a concept like 4IR and develop policies that make a real difference.

Even countries like South Africa and Rwanda that have formalised 4IR policy-making still don’t seem to have any clear guidelines on what it means from a day-to-day policy management perspective.

MILLION STEPS

4IR narratives are for high-level landscaping. They can create a sense of unity between possibilities like limitless energy and immediacy. But moving from pacemakers made from a patient’s own cells to whether Facebook can create a global digital currency involves a million steps of analysis, none of which get any clearer.

The fusion of industries, whilst true, is still constrained by the fact that the economics in different industries are not converging as fast as the applications being churned out through that convergence.

While most people tend to focus on data and algorithms, integrations are far and above the most critical. I do not believe that disruption is accelerated by hyper-integration. The truth is, hyper-integration is making disruption too expensive, cumbersome and slow, and only reward those who can align themselves within newly converging industries.

HUGE CAPITAL

While there are still a few giant tech companies that can cause seismic shifts within a small set of narrow industries, most businesses in Africa struggle to move the needle because of how tightly integrated business models and value chains have become.

Kenyan start-ups in particular have lacked the muscle to disrupt, because they lack huge amounts of capital which then bumps them against a profitability ceiling and renders their advantages unsustainable.

So, what does this mean for 4IR policymaking? Companies need to put on a new lens when observing their industries by treating data integrations as critical assets.

AI TRAINING

African governments, therefore, should stop focusing only on data policies and how to build local AI training programmes, but create environment to invest in integrations that can be delivered as a public resource to lower the cost and other hurdles for truly innovative local enterprises.

Mr Ngila is a 4IR journalist at Nation Media Group; [email protected]