During re:publica 2015, Juliet Wanyiri (centre), illustrates a practical workshop organised by Foondi*, of which she is founder and CEO. Credit: re:publica/Jan Zappner

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Jun 26 2015 (IPS)

In a major paradigm shift, the German government is now placing its bets on digitalisation for its development cooperation policy with Africa, under what it calls a Strategic Partnership for a ’Digital Africa’.

According to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), “through a new strategic partnership in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), German development cooperation will be joining forces with the private sector to support the development and sustainable management of Digital Africa’s potential.”

“Digitalisation offers a vast potential for making headway on Africa’s sustainable development,” said Dr Friedrich Kitschelt, a State Secretary in BMZ, noting however that this “benefits all sides, including German and European enterprises.”

Broad consensus about the overlap between public and private interests in attaining sustainable development goals was apparent at two high-profile events earlier this year – the annual re:publica conference on internet and society, and BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference, both held in Berlin."Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships” – Muhammad Radwan of icecairo

In Berlin for re:publica 2015 in May, Mugethi Gitau, a young Kenyan tech manager from Nairobi’s iHub, an incubator for “technology, innovation and community”, delivered a sharp presentation titled ‘10 Things Europe Can Learn From Africa’.  “We are pushing ahead with creative digital solutions,” said Gitau, delivering sharp know-how and hard facts.

The Kenyan start-up iHub is a member of the m:lab East Africa consortium, the region’s centre for mobile entrepreneurship, which was established through a seed grant from the World Bank’s InfoDev programme for “creating sustainable businesses in the knowledge economy”.

In turn, m:lab East Africa is part of the Global Information Gathering (GIG) initiative, which was founded in Berlin in 2003 as a partnership of BMZ, the German Federal Enterprise for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The m:lab East Africa consortium has spawned 10 tech businesses which have gone regional, and boasts a portfolio of 150 start-ups, including Kopo Kopo, an add on to the M-Pesa money transfer application which has scaled into Africa, the PesaPal application for mobile credits, the Eneza ‘one laptop per child’ project, and locally relevant rural applications such as iCow and M-Farm which help farmers keep track of their yields and cut out the middleman to reach buyers directly.

“We are by nature a people who love to give, crowdsourcing is in our genes, our local villages have a tradition of coming together to help each other out, so it’s no wonder we have taken to sharing and social media like naturals,” Gitau told IPS, mentioning the popular chamas or “merry-go-rounds” whereby people bank with each other, avoiding banking interest costs.

Referring to the exponential tide of 700 million mobile phone users in Africa, which has already surpassed Europe, Thomas Silberhorn, a State Secretary in BMZ, told a re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information projects in developing countries: “This is a time of huge potential, like all historical transformations.”

The pace and range of innovative mobile solutions from Africa has been formidable. The creative use of SMS has enabled a range of services which enable urban and, significantly, rural populations to access anything from banking to health services, job listings and microcredits, not to mention mobilising “shit storms” against public authority inefficiencies.

However, the formidable pace of digital penetration has raised concerns about the “digital divide” – the widening socio-economic inequalities between those who have access to technology and those who have not.

Increasingly a North-South consensus is growing concerning three core aspects of digital economic development – the regulation of broadband internet as a public utility; the sustainable potential of mobile technology and low price smart devices to bring effective solutions to a whole gamut of local needs; and the need for good infrastructure as a precondition for environmental protection and as the leverage people need to lift themselves out of poverty.

New models of development cooperation, technology transfer and e-participation governance are emerging in response to the impact of digitalisation on all sectors of society and service provision in areas as disparate as they are increasingly connected including health, food and agriculture – access to education, communication, media, information and data and democratic participation.

“Tackling the digital divide is crucial,” said Philibert Nsengimana, Rwandan Minister of Youth and ICT, addressing BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference. “It encompasses a package of vision, implementation and much needed coordination among stakeholders.”

Rwanda, which now boasts a number of e-participation projects such as Sobanukirwa, the country’s first freedom of information project, is committed to universally accessible broadband and is rising to the forefront of Africa’s power-sharing technical revolution. 

The most active proponents of the e-revolution argue that digitalisation also offers the possibility to place governments under scrutiny and have leaders judged from the vantage point of e-participation, open data, freedom of expression and information – all elements of the power-sharing models that have seen the light  in the internet age.

“Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships,” said Muhammad Radwan of icecairo.

The icecairo initiative is part of the international icehubs network, which started with iceaddis in Ethiopia and icebauhaus in Germany.

The icehubs network (where ‘ice’ stands for Innovation-Collaboration-Enterprise) is an emerging open network of ‘hubs’, or community-driven technology innovation spaces, that promote the invention and development of home-grown, affordable technological products and services for meeting local challenges.

The network is enabled by GIZ, a company specialising in international development, which is owned by the German government and mainly operates on behalf of BMZ, which is now intent on using a “digital agenda” to guide German development cooperation with Africa.

“Let us take digitalisation seriously,” said Kitschelt. “Let us use the potential of ICT for development, address the digital and educational divide and build on that resourcefulness in our partnerships by advocating for digital rights and engaging in dialogue with the tech community, software developers, social entrepreneurs, makers, hackers, bloggers, programmers and internet activists worldwide.”

Kitschelt’s words certainly found their echo among African e-revolutionaries whose rallying cry has moved forward significantly from “fight the power“ to “share the power”.

However, while this may be well be what the future looks like, there were also those at the re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information who wondered about priorities when Silberhorn of BMZ told participants: “”The fact that in many development countries we are witnessing better access to mobile phones than toilets is a clear catalyser for changing development priorities.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

*  Foondi is an African design and training start-up that focuses on creating access to open source, low-cost appropriate technology-related sources to leverage local technologies for bottom-up innovation. It provides a platform for problem setting, designing and prototyping entrepreneurial-based ventures. Its larger vision is to nurture a group of young innovators in Africa working on building solutions that target emerging markets and under-served communities in Africa.

Children in Georgetown, Guyana learn about solar energy during an exhibition. Credit: CREDP

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 8 2013 (IPS)

When James Husbands, a 24-year-old Barbadian businessman, began weighing the possibility of manufacturing solar water heaters, there was already a prototype on the island that had been designed and installed by an Anglican priest living there in the early 1970s.

A market study on the viability of producing solar water heaters had been done by a local NGO. This study, coupled with the Barbados government’s imposition of import duties on the solar water heaters sold by an Australian company to the island, convinced James that the time was right to enter the field."Governments cannot promote what they do not understand and utilities do not promote what they are not supplying themselves." -- CREDP's Thomas Scheutzlich

Husbands, now managing director of Solar Dynamics, told the IPS that government support in the late 1970s was crucial to the success of his venture in the early days. Barbados currently has the fifth highest penetration worldwide of solar water heaters per thousand households.

Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho, a specialist in the Energy Division of the Infrastructure and Environment Sector of the Inter-American Development Bank, told IPS that Latin America and the Caribbean use renewable energy (RE) in much greater proportion than any other region, although much of that is hydropower and biofuels. The use of wind and solar remain quite small.

IDB and its partners have sponsored a competition since 2009 for RE and Energy Efficiency projects in the Caribbean, the winners of which receive up to 100,000 dollars in financing and technical support. Eight winners were selected last year. The competition, IDEAS, has among its criteria that winners’ projects should benefit the poor, gender equity, and indigenous communities.

An added incentive to accelerate the slow pace of RE development, even though the region is not a major source of fossil fuel emissions, is the spate of devastating natural disasters over the past decade.

Ulric Trotz, deputy director and science adviser of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), told IPS in an e-mail, “Extreme weather events (often associated with climate change) have caused significant damage to the region. For example, Hurricane Ivan in Grenada wiped out approximately 200 percent of her GDP in 2004. Similarly, a one in 100-year flood in Guyana in 2005 wiped out more than 60 percent of that country’s GDP in that year, moving it from a positive growth position to a negative real growth.”

Consequently, Caribbean governments have begun taking a more proactive approach to promoting the development of renewable energy, establishing an Energy Unit at the Caricom regional headquarters which works in conjunction with the CCCCC.

Trotz said promoting renewable energy is important, because “by diverting costs away from the importation of fossil fuels, [Caribbean] countries will have additional resources from the savings to put towards building resilience to the impacts of Climate Change and Climate Vulnerability.

“It is not just the conversion to renewable energy but energy efficiency” that the region is focusing on, he said.

He added that “pooling RE projects across the region might have a catalytic effect of encouraging investment as this may significantly lower transaction costs and make investment more attractive.”

The Caribbean, apart from Trinidad and Tobago, which is an oil producer, currently spends billions on the importation of fossil fuels every year. In May, while on a visit to Trinidad, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made the point that energy costs in the region need to be lowered and the use of renewable energy increased.

“There’s probably no group of nations better situated to take advantage of renewable energy possibilities than here in the Caribbean. And we know that many Caribbean nations pay three times more for energy than we do in the United States of America…[We] are working together on this, looking to invest in connected regional grids to create economies of scale and renewable energy – economies of scale that are driven by renewable energy,” he said.

The region has also sought the assistance of European Union partners, and launched the Caribbean Renewable Energy Development Programme with the major objective of strengthening the ability of Caribbean countries to mobilise investors to make the shift from conventional energy investment to renewable energy investment.

According to Thomas Scheutzlich, principal advisor of the Caribbean Renewable Energy Program (CREDP) since 2003, lack of an enabling legal policy framework and lack of well-defined bankable project proposals have been major barriers to the development of RE projects in the Caribbean region.

Scheutzlich has overall responsibility for implementation of the CREDP programme on behalf of the German consultancy company Projekt-Consult GmbH, which is charged by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) with the implementation of CREDP. Germany is responsible for 80 percent of CREDP’s funding.

One problem is that many banks in the region are unsure of the economic soundness of RE ventures and are unable to judge the risks inherent in such new technology, Scheutzlich said. The lack of government guarantees also makes traditional banks reluctant to back such ventures.

However, regional and international banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the European Investment Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank “are all looking for bankable energy projects and offer financing,” he said.

Scheutzlich added that, “There is still a widespread and general lack of understanding of the potential of indigenous energy sources and energy efficiency throughout the society. Subsequently, governments cannot promote what they do not understand and utilities do not promote what they are not supplying themselves.”

Utility companies in the region generally have universal monopoly over the generation, transmission, distribution, and sale of electricity. “This is their traditional business model and they will only divert from that model if it is economically attractive” for them to do so, he said.

But despite the slow pace in the Caribbean, during the last few years the energy landscape has been “positively changing with the change processes accelerating and gaining a certain dynamism, and this is exactly what CREDP wants to trigger.”