Africa must look to tech to reimagine the future
By People Reporter, November 9, 2020Kendi Nderitu
This year has been one of uncertainty and unexpected challenges. While it’s nothing new to say things have changed, it is clear Africa will continue to go through accelerated transformation.
When it comes to digital, the continent was on a steady paced trajectory to adopting technologies particularly in regard to governance.
Digital transformation in government was still in early stages when the pandemic compelled countries to leverage technology to find innovative solutions to limitations, such as the need for social distancing.
Transformation in government is vital to enhancing public services that enable a better quality of life for citizens as technology can help support better decision-making and ensure efficient use of resources while strengthening transparency and accountability.
But, now as we are moving past responding to these obstacles and are looking to ensure recovery of the continent, there is need to increase transformation efforts to create an improved future capable of weathering disruption and come out on the other side relatively unscathed.
While African countries have made significant steps to improve governance, there remain a number of service delivery challenges.
Apart from lack of resources, education, health, water, and sanitation continue to be some daunting obstacles that governments continue to tackle.
Technology is a powerful enabler and can have monumental positive affect on service delivery.
It has the ability to re-engineer current systems and processes to improve functionality and quality of services, promote innovation and inclusion, and facilitate a better relationship between government and its people while enabling developmental growth.
A key area where African governments must invest in technologies is communication and collaborative technology.
Collaborative solutions enable centralised and coordinated communication between teams, agencies and leadership.
Through a shared workspace, governments are able to increase transparency for workers in one department of projects underway in another, thus having a greater overview of entire picture and how it relates to the work one group is doing.
Open lines of communication make participation easier through chats, calls and shared files and facilitates co-creation and collaboration.
Meanwhile, remote government access solutions can increase flexibility of agencies by curating personalised services, when and where it’s needed, while providing faster response and resolution times which create a better customer experience.
Collaborative technologies can also scale up government services, helping to expand access to communities that have not had it before and makes government more inclusive.
Government agencies store, generate, and process a massive amount of sensitive data.
Meanwhile, cybercrime is rapidly increasing around the world, particularly during the pandemic as cybercriminals aim to take advantage of vulnerable people and organisations.
As such, it is imperative that government ensure data is secure and deploy systems that cannot be breached.
Africa’s governments must look to robust and trusted security solutions that will help protect critical infrastructure and information and ensure privacy and compliance.
Strong cybersecurity can help to prevent data loss while agencies share critical information during collaborative projects that enhance service delivery.
This will facilitate public trust in government agencies across the continent. — The writer is the country manager, Microsoft Kenya