Africa’s age of disruption: where are all the makers?

I like the word disruption. It’s one of a few chaotic words that are trendy right now, and it’s used in a good way. These days if you work in tech you must be disruptive: if you are not trying to disrupt an industry then what good are you?

Disruption. That’s the watchword.

In Africa today it is more important than ever to disrupt industries and change the way things are done. Africa is at the forefront of tech innovation (especially with mobile), building platforms that solve African problems as well as apps that connect the continent.

Software seems to be disrupted daily in Africa, but hardware not so much. There are a few entrepreneurs that have been building Africa-centric hardware such as tablets and mobile devices but Africa’s maker culture hasn’t quite taken off as it should have. Yes should have. As a continent, Africa is possibly one of the few continents that should be disrupting the hardware space. A place where innovation is born out of necessity, Africa’s investors need to rise and take their place on the world’s stage.

So where are the makers?

That’s the question, I guess, that promoted the start of Maker Faire Africa. I like this initiative and what it’s trying to do. According to the consortium behind the project, the idea is to create an environment for builders and creators:

The aim of Maker Faire Africa is to create a space on the African continent where Afrigadget-type innovations, inventions and initiatives can be sought, identified, brought to life, supported, amplified and propagated. At the same time, Maker Faire Africa would seek to imbue creative types in science and technology with an appreciation of fabrication and by default manufacturing.

In a recent interview with Smart Monkey TV, Emeka Okafor (a co-founder of the Maker Faire Africa movement) commented that there are “tinkers and fabricators” in Africa but what was lacking was a culture of production and understanding around a need for production. Need is key to disrupting an industry, and from what currently exists in Africa’s hardware space — because there more global manufacturers out there building products that service an African need — the need for Africans to build it themselves doesn’t seem to have taken hold.

The problem with that line of thinking is forgetting that in Africa, no matter how far the continent has come, connectivity still remains a major issue and most manufacturers building around connectivity don’t think about the African context.

Enter BRCK — hardware and software — a device being built in Africa and hoping to solve the continent’s connectivity issues. Think about it: a device able to connect to the internet intelligently and seamlessly, hopping between ethernet, Wifi, and any available 3G or 4G mobile phone network. A truly African invention built in Africa — isn’t that the sort of disruption that a growing continent, with six of the world’s fastest growing economies, needs?

According to Okafor, the makers are there and they are building. One of the key challenges, and something that Maker Faire Africa is hoping to tackle, is to “foster communities on a grand scale”.

“Partnering with local schools, encouraging the creation of maker spaces and hacker spaces. Thinking through the exploration of making as a form of introduction to vocational skills,” says Okafor.

For Africa there needs to be a mindset shift and the way Okafor sees it, “if people begin to tinker they can add value to any range of products that can yield to income-yielding actives.”

In an age of disruption where technology is at the core of every business, education and lifestyle innovations in Africa need to make a claim in every aspect of the current boom.