“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself”. Malcolm X
The title of this post might seem a bit provocative, but the idea behind this sentence is to demonstrate that we frequently have erroneous biases about Africa’s talents. Today, nearly 50% of Africans are under age 15, meaning by 2040, the world’s largest labor force will be in Africa.
Despite geographical and infrastructure constraints, representing an important limit to reach education facilities, universities in many African countries are experiencing a surge in their enrollment, with a significant increase from 2.3 million to 5.2 million (source: State of Education in Africa Report 2015)
The advent of internet is key to overcome education boundaries, and its growth in Africa since 2000 has been amazingly 9,942 % (source: Internet World Stats).
What about innovation?
In such a tough environment creativity flourishes at its best, demonstrating that, where there is a challenge, there is an opportunity.
We can then discover some impactful inventions from this great continent:
- The plague of pneumonia kills every year thousands of kids because of misdiagnosis. A Ugandan engineer has designed a biomedical “smart jacket” for the preliminary diagnoses of this illness, thanks to a modified stethoscope put in a vest, which records, through a mobile app, the audio of the patient’s chest, to detect any possible lung crackles.
- In Cameroon, it is difficult for people living in rural areas to reach the hospitals where heart specialists work. For this reason, the Cardio Pad has been invented in this country, providing a medical computer tablet, allowing healthcare workers located in rural areas to send the results to specialists via a mobile phone.
- A young graduate engineer from Kenya has invented the charging shoes, based on a chip fixed into the sole of the shoes, to collect the electricity generated by pedestrians when walking, in order to recharge mobile phones, through a cable. This is surely an unconventional way of producing energy.
- After the numerous accidents in mines, in a South African University, the first virtual reality mine center has been established, to provide trainings on safety and dangers, for students and mine staff, in a simulated mining environment.
These are just a few representative example of how the tech revolution in Africa looks like, since technologies like 3D printing, Virtual reality and Blockchain are being embraced. Blockchain in particular has the potential to help African countries in solving problems related to a complex system of bureaucracy and administration, lands management, finance and banking.
One of the major troubles companies face when trying to recruit remote workers based in Africa, for example, is the difficulty to pay wages: many people do not have a bank account or a passport, or it is difficult and expensive to send them money. Cryptocurrencies are solving the problem of making secure business payments across borders. From our perspective, we want to help African talents to succeed in their progress and share their creative abilities with the rest of the world. Here is where a limitless technology like blockchain can support our mission to assist Humans in building a portable and trustworthy online reputation.
Skyllz is a blockchain-based protocol to replace resumes with a unified, portable and trustworthy skill-related reputation. Our mission is to unify, validate and track professional skills across applications in a distributed, borderless and unbiased way, to build a universal and evolving Human Skills Ecosystem.
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