It is very essential to the development of any area, and it is something we in Africa seem to care very less about. We enjoy regular jobs, leaving the path of innovations to young stars who are probably poorly equipped to take over from an older innovative generation who aren’t in existence.
A popular school of thought has it that a major challenge to innovation in Africa are the whites, and they speedily purchase any ideas we generate to make sure nothing good comes out of the continent.
How True Is This?
Well, on a scale of 100%, I could say that it is 30% true! What do I mean? The whites actually purchase our ideas, but they do not do it to block good things from coming out of our continent, neither do they force our innovators to sell them off.You see, everyone is looking for money – both the businesses that purchase the ideas and the innovators. We have a good number of top companies here who could have purchased these ideas and monetized them to benefit the continent, but they do not see any good in ‘raw materials’ until the whites do.
Take for instance, if blacks would have been the colonial masters, they would have possibly cared very less about Africans, possible because they would be looking for ready-made humans.
Gold cannot be gold without being worked on. If something good must come out from us, we shouldn’t be sitting arms crossed! There are a lot of things we could do every day that would help us in the later run, but we must first tackle the challenges.
There are so many challenges posing themselves to the younger generations who intend doing something great. These challenges, may take time to be fought, but if something is collectively done today, in a few years time we’d look back to smile hard for a victory come so soon.
Some of these challenges include:
• Education: How can 17-year olds in African secondary schools still be learning how to draw and label grasshoppers on the black boards while our white counterparts are already developing simple software and publishing books?The final year projects we write in our tertiary institutions which were supposedly introduced to help students tackle various challenges aren’t even properly managed to see to the purposes. What would be the final results?
The various countries would be left with no options rather than half-baked students who would be waiting on the government to give them jobs when there are so many opportunities to create well-paying jobs for their selves.
• Access to capital: After education, the next common challenge African innovators face are lack of capital to fund their ideas.
There are no accessible loans, and you do not have possible jobs that could help you source funds to bring your ideas to reality. In Nigeria for instance, the monthly minimum wage is roughly $50. Your transportation and lunch alone would have sapped deep into the money, and at the end of the month, you are left with almost nothing from a full-time job.
• Physical infrastructure and social amenities: In Africa, we are grossly in lack of good roads, airports and some social amenities like electricity.
Imagine a young adult who wants to launch a web-design firm having to suffer from lack of electricity. He might not even be able to fund a generator or an alternative power source, and it would finally lead to discouragements.
If something good must come out from our continent to us, our government need to seriously see to all these.
• Laziness and carefree attitude among the younger generation: It is not any secrets that most African youth are lazy. The ones you hear about doing exploits offline and online are roughly 10% of the whole.
Imagine if 80% of us were interested in making little impacts to our black world? I think we’d be very far from where we are now.
Truly the problems to our innovation in Africa aren’t the whites, we are the ones. I hope we get to change for better so the upcoming generation can have something to be thankful for!
We give you the best daily information on news, technology, lifestyle, career, health tips, agriculture, business and entertainment. If you can write very well and want to make a living writing online, click HERE!