Africa – Smart, innovative

Adolfo Hernandez is guest blogging for the Forum. He is the President of Alcatel-Lucent EMEA and is participating in the World Economic Forum on Africa

Wrapping up here in Cape Town after having had the privilege of participating in many discussions, listening and learning about the present and potential future routes for Africa.

During the official panel I participated in (Infrastructure: The Trillion Dollar Opportunity) I was asked to summarize my parting thoughts and I reflected in real time: "When you face a big challenge – by now everyone has a great understanding of the challenges at hand – you face a choice between solving the problem by sheer brute force, or being smart and innovative, or a combination of both."

The remarkable thing was that when prompted,  a senior logistics company executive commented : "Before you put more money into building more roads, airports, ports and customs, please give more money to companies such as Mr Hernandez's to ensure that today’s infrastructure and processes such as goods and people who handle customs are truly smart, efficient, secure and safe..,,."  I can only agree with that.

Seriously, how would “Smart, Innovative Africa” really look like? How much more could we advance with wholesale deployment of tools like mHealth to bring healthcare to rural areas? What impact could we have if we deployed at scale eEducation and mLearning to overcome the multigenerational challenge of skills and education? How would traffic, pollution and daily life in the huge number of emerging African cities, with populations in the millions, look like if we deployed smart transportation, smart signalling, smart traffic management systems? What would the impact be on potential corruption limitation by enabling more electronic settlements? How would capital markets change if we introduced new technologies to drive efficiencies and costs down radically and pass them on to business and consumers? How would the new emerging youth in Africa develop and really be connected to an increasingly rich set of services and communities online? How would it look like if we deployed smarter technologies like lightRadio to connect more people in rural areas and under-served energy territories?

Worth a thought…worth a cause….I like the thought of “Africa – Smart, Innovative”!

This post also appears on the Alcatel-Lucent blog