Nigeria’s Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo has called on the African Continent to take advantage of opportunities opened by the Free Trade Agreement AfCTA,as it would make Africa the largest single, seamless trading bloc in the world.
Osinbajo stated this in his remarks on Thursday at the 10th Anniversary Dinner of Afrilabs, the pan-African organisation that provides network for technology and innovation centres across the continent.
The event, held at the State House Conference, Abuja, was attended by over 300 innovators and entrepreneurs from 51 countries across Africa.
“The opportunities for tech and innovation to build synergies across borders and create African tech giants are obvious. But even now our fintech and e-commerce companies can extend their reach, as they will be able to partner with other regional and international fintechs to facilitate payments and make digital cross border remittances,”Vice President Osinbajo stated.
He explained that the bright, and prosperous future for Africa beckons on the innovators, reminding them that they “are the great titans that will take us there.”
Access to support
Professor Osinbajo urged governments in Africa to ensure that access to support programmes are transparent and merit-based, and advised them to work harder on providing cheap, patient capital for innovation, with a view at ensuring that innovators are able to access this capital.
He said, “For its own part, the ecosystem must work with government to determine the parameters of access to these programmes.”
Public Good
According to the Vice President, tech and innovation cannot and should not just be for profit but for the public good.
“Tech holds the power to create gigantic commercial ventures with huge returns but the fullness of the transformative and revolutionary potential of the ecosystem will be achieved when we address issues of the public good.
“This means bringing our capacity for innovation upon our big developmental challenges such as social security, financial inclusion and access to healthcare.
“And while we pursue this and begin to experience the power of tech to transform lives, we must also concern ourselves with issues of ethics and oversight. As the debate around some of the major social media platforms is showing us, those of us in the tech ecosystem must be alive not only to the prospect of profits but to the social and public implications of their work.
“Technology and innovation impose responsibilities on us – in this case, it is the responsibility to design algorithms guided by the common good,” Professor Osinbajo explained.
Nigeria’s journey
Sharing the Nigeria government journey in supporting technology and innovation, Osinbajo said one of the first actions taken in 2015 as an administration was to work with development partners to conduct an innovation mapping exercise across Nigeria.
He explained that, “We did this by engaging the ecosystem across the country, including Afrilabs at the time, and this process led to the report titled ‘Catalyzing Growth in Nigeria through Innovation’.
“In this report, we also examined international examples of successful hubs to understand what factors drive success and sustainability and how these lessons could be applied to Nigeria, with a specific focus on demand, supply, and the enabling environment as drivers of innovation.
“Armed with the results of this exercise, we supported more than 12 private sector-led innovation hubs across the country through our social investments programme.
“Working with the World Bank and the Lagos Business School, we supported the establishment of the Nigeria Climate Innovation Center in Lagos, and in partnership with the American University of Nigeria and the International Committee of the Red Cross we supported the establishment of Africa’s first Humanitarian Innovation Hub in Adamawa State.”
He said the administration also established the Technology and Creativity Advisory Group, which is part of the Industrial Policy and Competitiveness Advisory Council.
“This group is made up of members from the private sector and relevant stakeholders in the public sector and has offered advice to Government on various policies and initiatives over the last few years.
“Some of the policy initiatives developed from the advisory group include the wide range of licenses issued by the CBN for fintechs, the collaboration with the African Development Bank to raise $500million to support technology and creative start-ups, venture capital and investments.
“We also took the view that Government must be the chief marketers of start-ups. So we supported the tech ecosystem from the highest levels of Government since 2015.
“In 2016 Mr. President and I hosted start-ups here in Abuja at the Aso Villa Demo Day, Mark Zuckerberg was a guest at the event, and in 2018 I went on a tour of tech spaces around Lagos and visited a couple of startups, including Paystack and Andela,” Vice President Osinbajo added.
President of the African Angels Network, Tommy Davies asked governments across Africa to look at how they could sustain and maintain the momentum Afrilabs has generated by providing capacity to help build the companies that the innovators are building.
“This is quite important because our economic development and our economic survival quite naturally depend on it,” Davies said.
One of the innovators that were in Nigeria for the event was Collins Kimaro, co-founders of the Ubuntu Hub in Arusha, Tanzania.
He told Voice of Nigeria that innovations in Africa would need to work together to make more impact.
Kimaro’s hub was one of the twelve that won an award of fifteen thousand Euros each at the event.
Confidence Okwuchi
