IoT consist of a complex ecosystem and will be delivered through partnership and collaboration – African perspective.




When it comes to adopting technologies, Africa is often a unique market for obvious reasons i.e. lack of infrastructure and diverse economies.   Our uniqueness can make Africa an implementation frontier.  However Africa’s regional diversity requires different approaches to implementing IoT Solution.  The localisation of global use cases will be key to implementation in sectors like agriculture. Health care and logistics.


Firstly lets us unpack IoT
The discussions around IoT continue to dominate in all government and business platforms.  The prospect of a myriad of interconnected devices inspires both hope and fear.  For business, IoT promises to deliver operational efficiencies and enabling faster decision making.  Business leaders are also tackling the fears around skills and loss of jobs.  In the midst of that, many people still regard IoT as one technology solution.

IoT consist of a complex ecosystem with industry specific implications.  It involves combining and integrating a range of components to provide an end to end solution, which means its highly unlikely that one single player will control an entire eco system.  The ecosystem requires partnership to deliver solution that has business or societal value

Back to Africa
IoT will bring new opportunities to Africa to solve its many problems but also to develop new applications that might contribute to the world at large. Unlike the previous technological revolutions where we in the developing world woke up too late to be leaders in the technology, today, thanks to the Internet, we can learn about the evolution of IoT at the same time as others in the developed world and aspire to be leaders and not just followers in the field.

According to Bekele, We cannot only “enjoy” finished technologies as we used to do in the past but shape the new technology by participating in its development and its standardization. 
That on its own requires partnership and collaboration among all stakeholders.
  

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