In the last few weeks I have been tasked with preparing a document that should contain a strategic direction for a business unit I work with at my day job. This therefore meant I had to spend a lot of time reading or more like brushing up my research skills. (I can tell you for free, the research consultants are the real MVPs. So much information and data to process and glean out for what you require).
As I spent time looking through a lot of reports and articles, it occurred to me the solutions to the many similar challenges of the 54 African countries can potentially be addressed with Mobile Technology. I know you are thinking I might be biased in my line of thoughts. “Hear” me out, I just might be awakening your “senses” to the opportunities we are not paying attention to in Africa.
Lets take each one after the other in various write-ups I would focus on for the next few weeks.
Major Challenge No 1: Unemployment – Africa has one of the highest levels of unemployment in the world. With more than 70 percent of Africa’s population under the age of 25, there is a massive untapped workforce. But on the flip side, that in itself is an opportunity as Mobile Phone penetration increases in the various countries across the continent. Falling device prices are encouraging the rapid adoption of smartphones, with the region set to add more than 400 million new smartphone connections by 2020 (GSMA reports). Unconfirmed reports puts the Youths driving this increase in the adoption of the smartphones. I personally therefore look forward to the Solution that can be created/developed to potentially keep the African Youth mentally busy and valuable to its society.
A while back, I was in a meeting with a client in South Africa and he was telling us of the success of M4JAM in his country. He grabbed by attention and I paid significant attention to the innovators of a mobile solution that creates jobs for many. What did they do? They created a microjobbing service that allows brands, NGOs or the public sector to post a number of small tasks, which promoted by M4JAM and taken on by “jobbers” who complete them using their mobile phones. Once these micro jobs are complete, M4JAM collates and sends the finished package to the employer, with M4JAM and the jobber then getting paid.
At launch it posted 100,000 jobs, and at the end of the first day, 6,782 jobs had been completed with M4Jam paying out up to R101,730 ($ 7,300) in remunerations. In two weeks they were out of jobs.
Need we say more?
The need is right there, the opportunity sits right smack in our faces, and question therefore is what other solution can we bring on board to potentially solve this challenge that plagues the 54 countries in Africa.
We focus on Access to finance next………….
