Panellists at the 2023 edition of the ‘Mobile technology for Development Conference’ have made a strong case for overcoming internal and self-created barriers in order to change Africa's narrative as a poor and needy continent.

The speakers on the fifth panel of Day One of the Conference were unanimous in their assertion that barriers in education, technology and policy implementation, most of which are self-imposed are holding the continent back in the realisation of its full potential.

Andrew Takyi-Appiah, the founder of Zeepay insisted that while Africa has made great strides in recent years, it will take the removal of self-imposed policy or implementation barriers to significantly change the perceptions about the continent.

"The poverty we need to come out of is the barriers we create for ourselves," he said.

"The transition is not because we are poor, but probably because we don't have wealth in our minds. We are not sectorial driven, The payment industry needs to go into a sectorial focus. We need to start getting to the point where, from an emerging perspective, we have payment companies that focus on remittances, insurance, banking services, capital markets, etc so that it's product-solution driven."   

 Second Stacks, Kwesi Fynn shared these sentiments, adding that his outfit has been working on removing some of these barriers, including improving access to the massive wealth the continent has to offer.

"There's so much for us in Africa. We have so many opportunities and there's so much money. But what happens to that cash? Everything is siloed," he said.

"Where a company like Second Stacks comes into the equation is that we're building technology to ensure that everybody can access this cash eventually. it expands the availability of cash and equity. We're enabling something that's already there and trying to make it more efficient. 

Leo Skarlatos, the Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Airtel Tigo insisted that Africa can learn from what other continents like Europe and Asia went through, taking steps that would enable the continent reach those levels of development much more rapidly.

"We have to change with the times. Africa has managed to leapfrog a couple of things that Europe went through in the telecoms world by going over the copper phase. It's saved us about 15 years. I see the same thing coming when we're talking about Fintech," he explained.

"We can take advantage of the newest and best technology while modernising it for our use." 

Maabena Brobbey. Project Coordinator at IT Consortium emphasised the importance of an educated workforce to take Africa to the next level. 

Training people to take advantage of the opportunities that exist and maximise the technology they are provided with would go a long way to ensuring the continent changes its narrative.

"Without a skilled workforce, all of this won't be fruitful. In Africa, our educational methods are very abstract. We are taught more to do memorisation and reproduce that same information instead of problem-solving. So we have most people completing school who come into the real world and are not able to apply what they are taught in the real world," she said. 

It's very important that we invest in education and training such that people have the needed skills to participate in the digital economy. If we don't have skilled people, we can have the infrastructure and tools but it's not going to be very useful to us.  

The MT4D2023 conference aims to bring together experts on issues within educational, digital finance and agritech and digitized payments to explore the challenges and showcase successful solutions and case studies of how digital finance is impacting these sectors.

Source: Chamber News Desk