Innovation: tech in Africa is making its revolution
Audio 04:47
The Beninese of AS World Tech present their laptop.
© AS World Tech
By: Dominique Desaunay Follow
7 mins
From the web, to social networks and computer equipment, Africa is innovating!
This "digital leap" is mainly driven by young African shoots wishing to accelerate the economic development of the continent.
This is the reason why a Beninese company decided to launch its own high-tech brand to produce glasses and connected watches or even laptops exclusively made in Africa.
Advertising
Connected health, agriculture, education, online commerce, mobile applications or even the production of a multitude of high-tech objects!
There is no shortage of innovations in the digital sector on the continent, as the young Beninese entrepreneur Richard Odjrado shows us.
Its company AS World Tech has
the ambition to launch in local assembly workshops, a connected watch "preventive anti-theft", which, connected to your smartphone, alerts you when your mobile is away from you, discreet connected glasses and design for receiving calls and listening to music without ever taking your hands off the wheel, as well as latest generation laptops, all of whose parts are interchangeable.
This entrepreneurial and digital revolution which is emerging in Africa is accompanied by an environmental awareness, precise, enthusiastic, Richard Odjrado.
High-tech objects created by the Beninese company AS World Tech.
© AS World Tech
RFI: Hello Richard Odjrado. AS World Tech is the company you started, and also a brand with a very strong intention behind it.
Richard Odjrado:
We have invented several accessible and useful products not only for Africa, but also for the whole world. For example, we invented preventive anti-theft connected watches, which even the big brands have not achieved until today. When you move away more than three meters, the watch vibrates to alert you: "be
careful not to lose your phone
". Remember that in Africa the smartphone, "
it's man's best friend
", it knows everything about us, it contains all our personal and professional information, so we have an obligation to protect it. Then, we thought about the safety of our populations when they find themselves behind the wheel.
It all started with this simple thought: when you are no longer touching the steering wheel, who is looking at the road? Anybody ! This is when you pose a danger to yourself and your loved ones. This is the reason why we invented the connected glasses which allow you just with a single gesture by touching your glasses to answer your call, to stay in communication and connected with the possibility also to control your voice assistant from your glasses. . Then, buying a computer in Africa is a real headache. I really want to say that maybe it's a bit the same in Europe, so our computers are fully repairable and also recyclable.
When you have any problem, just send a little message via WhatsApp and bam, you have our after-sales service to take care of you!
In Africa, for the younger generations, it has become essential to buy a computer that is sustainable and recyclable and we make a point of honor at AS World Tech on the protection of the environment, in order to build together a new viable Africa. .
But to get there, you have to invest so there will necessarily be assembly plants that will be directly and locally installed in the countries of the continent, starting with Benin?
This is the vision!
We are starting to sell the products that we already design on site in Benin with our teams, but we are producing them elsewhere for the moment.
The goal is therefore to set up our assembly plant very quickly and then production, train the local workforce and move to other countries like Nigeria and for that, it is clear, we need 'investments.
But the short term goal is not to produce only for Africa, we have found that our products are of interest to the whole world, the Chinese are already ordering our computers and in Europe our glasses are in great demand.
Competition in the high-tech market must be very tough, with Asian firms on one side and Anglo-Saxon companies on the other, already dominating the sector?
Our secret boot can be summed up in one word: differentiation!
And I really want to tell you that all the big companies, the big brands all started modestly as small structures before becoming the digital giants that we know today.
But what is interesting to observe is that these large companies are no longer really capable of innovating.
And it is our turn to carry this innovation, not only through products, but also in services.
To take an example, if I invented the anti-theft connected watch, it is because I had been faced with the problem of having lost my smartphone.
Our strength in Africa is that we know our environment perfectly and that we are still in the best position to provide effective solutions to all our problems.
We now have the potential to be a leader in our own market and then to go internationally.
The proof, the products that we offer and that we release today are of interest to people in other parts of the world, so we have our place in the globalized high-tech market and AS World Tech was created precisely to that.
The connected glasses offered by AS World Tech.
© AS World Tech
There have been a lot of experiments with smartphones, for example, to create assembly workshops directly in Africa, it's something that works or that works halfway and what would be the reasons for this half-failure ?
So, obviously I analyzed the reasons for these relative "failures". In most cases, they were not necessarily 100% African companies or promoters. In addition, these people did not master the issue of digital uses in Africa and often focused on only one product. However, you cannot build a strong brand with just one product. This is the reason why we have decided to diversify, we are already planning everything that we are going to release as products for the next ten years in order to change the habits of users, whatever their sectors of activity.
I think we have the potential to solve the problems to set up an assembly plant in Africa. It's not that complicated in the end, we just have to find qualified young people capable of doing this work, we can train them and if we cannot bring together the skills we will look for them elsewhere. This is exactly what Japan and China have done and if they have been able to do it, then we too can do it in Africa. With their skills, Africans will be able to work, we will produce, we will innovate, because we have imagination to spare.
The problem is that in French-speaking Africa investors seem not to be interested in us because they have not understood the full potential that the demography represents on our continent which is made up mainly of young people or perhaps because of red tape that they encounter in African countries. But all this is changing, even our rulers have become aware of it. They are now supporting us in this development dynamic, because African youth are determined to change things and there will be no going back.
Creating sustainable and eco-responsible products is not the only concern of African tech designers.
According to the World Bank
, less than a third of the 1.3 billion Africans are currently connected to high-speed internet, young digital entrepreneurs believe that it is high time that sustainable telecoms and internet infrastructures were able to support their desires for the future in order to complete the economic and social development of an entire continent.
You have questions or suggestions, you can write to us at
news.technologies@rfi.fr
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
New technologies
Benign
Technologies