Is COVID19 an opportunity to drive equitable access in Africa?
By admin
by Sonwabise Mzinyathi
but has access to only 3% of healthcare workers, and less than 1% of the world’s financial resources. ICT innovation is pushed to a degree of choosing between investing in high tech, low cost intensive care units (ICU) and ventilators that can operate in Africa’s unpredictable conditions, or focusing on innovating in Africa’s already strained healthcare system to broader degrees with high levels of deaths from diseases such as HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition. This is not even something that should be an either or scenario but in Africa, we find ourselves contemplating these hard decisions nevertheless.
Regardless, Africans are designing mobile tech solutions to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic. In Nigeria, Wellvis has created the online COVID-19 Triage Tool, which allows users to self-assess their coronavirus risk category. The WHO’s tracking tool for COVID-19 was designed by a company from South Africa. Rwanda is using robots to conduct tests at a much faster pace and at a minimised risk to humans. From a WhatsApp chatbot to a self-diagnosis tool, Africans are devising mobile tech solutions to contain the spread of the coronavirus amid fears it could have disastrous effects for the continent’s most vulnerable and more eminently, women and children.
The education sector has to be one of the most protruding highlights in inequality in Africa and COVID-19 has played a major role in highlighting this. A few minorities have been enjoying the challenges of online learning, however a majority of Africans are sitting at home because of the lack of connectivity and devices to even participate in online learning despite efforts to implement zero rating. UNESCO estimates that one in five children worldwide did not participate in any form of education in 2016. Almost all of these 263 million children — between the ages of 6 to 17 years old — lived in developing countries. Yet, this crisis could worsen even this already dire outlook and perpetuate further inequality. Africa’s youth population is expected to double to 830 million people by 2050, according to the African Development Bank, but few resources are dedicated to educating these young people.
Online education is getting increased attention as a possible solution to widen access to education at an affordable cost, even more so during the crisis. The pandemic has enlarged the milestone to turn Africa’s bulging youth into economic growth through education and employment opportunities. It could be addressed, if there was determination to do so by African governments and participating service providers.
We need to differentiate between online learning and remote emergency learning and the latter is what this crisis has introduced; however, the remote emergency learning may lead to online learning as it was intended. The sector needs to be ready to commercially participate in this inevitability and/or as a tool of learning and a lot of changes still need to take place. How do we use technology to address traditional systems of education that excluded so many African children? Is it still necessary to ask a self-trained software developer to produce a certificate or a degree from a reputable institution before you employ them?
Whether it is investments into the education sector or another, we are seeing a lot of corporates and investors becoming more and more conservative and this has largely impacted funding and investment approaches for the sector, which could be dire considering that the continent is already on the backfoot of financial resourcing. Where cross-border collaboration was growing, now we are seeing more and more countries looking at their own internal innovations to grow their own economies but also exploit the void created by the change of geopolitics globally. It is up to African governments to take progressive stands that help with redress.
This period presents an opportunity for Africa to use ICT innovations to expand at an exponential pace and bridge inequality. Virtual learning will expand so that employees can develop new skills quickly. Lengthy and often expensive courses will not be as popular. Telemedicine usage will grow as distance care becomes a preferred way of medical consulting both by doctors and patients. Virtual reality will advance to promote more collaborative working. Production will quickly move into digitisation. Converging technology and cross-disciplinary skills will be eminent and of course, big data will continue to be a prominent player. And the elephant in the room for Africa remains, connectivity.
What is more important however is for African governments to use the challenges highlighted under COVID19 to implement equitable access and to restructure systematic inequality.
About the author
Sonwabise Mzinyathi is an advocate for the use of technology to bridge the inequality gap, specifically for the most vulnerable in the community – women and children. She is the Acting Chair of the South African Women in ICT Forum, a Councillor on the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment ICT Sector Council and she owns an impact investment company, Source Creations.
