Opportunities are constantly on the rise in Africa with a lot of young minds accelerating innovations and finding better ways to solve local problems.
Every year, the number of startups providing solutions increases, thereby attracting global brands for investments.
Despite these opportunities on the continent, Africa is still underperforming and Innovation remains challenged. In Nigeria, the innovation ecosystem has been growing, but a lot more needs to be done.
In this week’s edition of Tech Trends, I had a chat with Daniel Chinagozi the founder of IG Hub of Africa shares his thoughts on how we can deepen innovation in the ecosystem.
CFA: Daniel, glad to have you on the show today.
Daniel: Thank you CFA. Good to see you. How’ve you been sir?
CFA: Very well. Looking at the innovation ecosystem in 2021, what’s your take?
Daniel: Innovation ecosystem in 2021 it’s a year we need to do a lot of work. it’s a year we need to do a lot of collaboration. It’s a year we need to do a lot of engaging.
We need to engage with policy actors to ensure that we’re not building and then there are policies that are destroying. We should no longer build outside the government in 2021 because we cannot really grow the ecosystem if we are not well-positioned. Then, we need to also upskill.
Now when I say upskill, this is what I mean. We have a lot of developers and a lot of skilled people in the Nigerian ecosystem, but the next level where people need to build AI, IoT, Big data, the high-level solutions that can actually grow the Nigerian ecosystem to make us strong players across the world and across Africa. We need to build those skills that are required.
CFA: I like the phrase “ We don’t need to build outside the government.” Can you elaborate on what exactly you mean?
Daniel: Okay, you see what is happening with fintech companies. The CBN would come up with a policy today and then overturned all the strategies the companies have been building with all this while.
You see how it comes up. Initially, we heard that the CBN was looking to the cryptocurrency as a payment system and all that, but all of a sudden they came up with a final sledgehammer and said no crypto anything in Nigeria nothing will ever happen here with respect to cryptocurrencies. That changed the narrative for some people that have been innovating in that area.
You can watch the full interview here.
