“THERE is more to literacy than reading or writing.”This is the fundamental statement recently shared by one of Zimbabwe’s most successful chief executive officers who is Founder of Econet Wireless, Strive Masiyiwa.
BY TECHNOMAG
Zimbabwe is on record of being Africa’s most literate country for years, statistics that we have for long been very proud of.
The government has greatly invested in education resulting in a more that 90% literacy rate.
Recently, secretary for the Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development Ministry Dr Washington T Mbizvo passionately spoke on how the government is committed to development of education and technology at Research and Intellectual Expo which was recently showcased.
Mbizvo had earlier on revealed during an interview that the government has set aside 30% of its budget towards education which is a very huge chunk of the budget, of which $332, 731 00 was allocated to the ministry.
This is no doubt a very huge investment government has made which will obviously translate into mass literacy.
However, what good is this literacy? It’s high time Zimbabwe converted it’s our national High literate levels to practical success and technology, an area which lacking so very much.
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The Research and Intellectual Expo, RIE 2014 showcased hundreds of local initiatives that included students and research institutions that exhibited their projects, with the potential of turning around Zimbabwe’s economy.
What rather boggles the mind, is why then after all these efforts, we still do have a sea of unemployed masses and doors shutting out on any new entries to run industries.
How come we have failed to translate all these developments into real industrial opportunities?
These initiatives are capable of dealing with the unemployment as most of these solutions are sustainable and create employment opportunities.
Countries like Kenya, South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria are leading Africa in terms of technological development and yet they lag behind Zimbabwe in as far as education and literacy is concerned.
The question is, is our education system only teaching us to read and write figures and failed to teach us to critically think around sustainable solutions? Zimbabweans are much more innovative than the top four leading countries mentioned above, and the missing puzzle is energy draining.
Most entrepreneurs say the major challenge is capital injection which has hampered development of these initiatives.
While this is obviously critical, it’s not true that capital availed will tremendously change our tech ecosystem pitting Zimbabwe on the African map of innovators.
On the contrary, this has been the major reason why Zimbabwe has failed to develop as there is too much talk of capital injection and no brain coaching. Kenya has become the ICT hub of Africa because they have invested in training and nurturing their local talent via the establishment of a plethora of technology hubs and incubators.
The Kenyan government has fortunately received tremendous donor support to construct technology incubators and many non-governmental organisations have also invested in training and nurturing the talent, resulting in greatly contributing to their national gross domestic product.
Nairobi is currently the hotspot in the region with 16 technology hubs and still counting, innovation hubs, tech centres, accelerators and incubators This is mainly because it is being flooded with venture capital and business angels looking for start-ups to invest in.
Even Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently visited Nairobi and dubbed Kenya the continent’s technology leader with the launch of the $10 billion Konza Technology City just outside Nairobi is further evidence of the city’s promising future.
Of great interest is the place they coined the “iHub”, this is the co-working space for the tech community and business incubator which provides a space for entrepreneurs to receive mentorship and possible VC funding. More importantly, it also hosts the fastest Internet connectivity speed in the country.
The iHub is also home to the successful Ushahidi, a crowd mapping tool, a simple, but effective tool that allows information to be crowd sourced via mobile phones and the Internet and it makes mapping that information easy . This was used to map reports of the 2008 electoral violence Besides Kenya, there are at least 91 tech hubs in Africa, according to CrowdMap, an app, which is crowdsourcing all of the technology hubs and incubators across the continent.
Nigeria is in the top 10 mobile markets on the planet in numbers of subscribers, posing serious potentials, there is also Bongo Hive an innovation hub which aspires to support the tech community in Zambia.
In Tanzania there is TanzICT founded in Dar es Salaam and KINU aims to become the central space for Tanzania’s tech community and was launched with grants from Google and Indigo Trust. We also have the iLab in Liberia, and the Ayiti Living Lab in Haiti leading in their regions.
What does Zimbabwe have, well from the government side we can safely say nothing, exactly one year ago, we saw two private technology hubs coming up in Zimbabwe that is Hypercube Hub a project spearheaded by Indigo Trust which worked closely with Hivos and the US Embassy in Zimbabwe and Muzinda Hub a project supported by Tsitsi Masiyiwa, wife to Econet wireless founder Strive Masiyiwa.
This where our government has missed it and needs to read the new technological rules from a completely different book altogether.
Educating and training students alone will not bring sustainable projects in this technological era, we now need to create Hubs and incubators to train and equip talent for sustainable technological developments.
Zimbabweans are way too gifted and smarter, should the playing field level up, and we have the potential to become the home to technology in Africa.
lThe writer is the editor for TechnoMag, Zimbabwe`s Premier Technology Magazine, more indepth from www.technom.ag/7T or join us on our facebook page www.facebook.com/technomagzw Email articles[at]technomag.co.zw tweet @TechnoMagZw
