By 2050, Africa will host the youngest population in the world. This raises a few fundamental opportunities as well as challenges as Africa has a unique social – economic and demographic makeup.
- On the economic font for instance, informal sector in some countries account for over 50% of the national output and over 90% of employment, yet very little information in known about the sector since, by definition, some or all aspects of informal economic activity are off the formal record. These entrepreneurs operating in the informal sector, although very talented and hard-working, often lack the platform to scale their transformative solutions in the most cost effective way possible.
- On the demographic font, Africa is home to the world’s youngest population. These spikes in youth populations among African countries is both a challenge and an opportunity – The young people are the one quick to embrace new disruptive technologies and will also need jobs and economic opportunities as they grow older, and, as their respective countries’ populations continue to grow, simply spreading what little wealth they already have will simply not be an option.
- On the social font, one important consequence of both rural out migration and international migration is the creation of a multi-cultural Africa – Multicultural Africa has imbibed new social and material values, new skills, experience, knowledge and a different perspective to life such as leveraging disruptive technologies to invest, trade and socialize. The internalized values are consciously transmitted and fed back into the society through innovation and technological change, promoting development and the human resource base of their respective countries.
- Technology has been key to many of Africa’s most exciting developments in recent years and will continue to remain the key to bridge some of the gaps faced by the Africa’s youth in general , integrate the informal sector into formal sector and create a transformative society that can embrace thefourth industrial revolution. Our focus shall be on international and regional collaboration, creating technology based investment solutions key to solving the continent’s challenges in three ways;
