Technology
African Leaders Urged To Invest More In Technology
By Dipo Olowookere
The annual Senior Experts Dialogue on Science, Technology and the African Transformation Agenda continued in South Africa Thursday with participants agreeing on the need for local government leaders across the continent to ramp up investment in technology and innovation to drive growth in cities, particularly at municipal level.
African innovators attending the SED 2016 believe that innovation needs to start at municipal level where governments engage directly with communities.
“It is good to talk about hubs of innovation in cities but hubs of innovation in dysfunctional cities will not work,” said Stellenbosch University’s Professor Mark Swilling.
He said from a governance point of view, most cities in Africa were dysfunctional with congestion, energy, water cuts and related issues that could hamper the progress being sought after.
“But from a people point of view, we have extraordinary abilities so the key to survival in African cities is how we learn and learn and re-learn in the blink of an eye to adjust, shift, take an opportunity and innovate. Africa has the extra-ordinary capacity for innovation but we have to love ourselves, our culture and capacity first rather than look elsewhere because we can do this,” said Mr Swilling.
SED 2016 seeks to identify key elements and issues, based on local experiences, that African governments, along with their international development partners, can take into account in formulating action plans to turn their cities from manufacturing and trade hubs into innovation hubs and centres.
Participants emphasised the need for increased development of infrastructure for information communication technology (ICT) in order to empower the continent’s millions of young people.
While the world embraces the Internet of Things, African youth cannot be left behind, they agreed with Gideon Adogbo, Advisor and Special Assistant in the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Nigerian Presidency, telling experts and representatives of member states attending the SED that without investing in the youth, Africa will lag behind in the ICT arena.
“Innovation must be turned into money or should help cities save money,” he said, adding over 152 million Nigerians were connected to the internet through their GSM phones creating huge opportunities for innovators.
Speaker Jonathan Muringani said African cities should be proactive in having the right policies that give innovators direction.
“Beyond a policy perspective, cities must move towards a management perspective and say how do we go about it and the how goes beyond just writing and talking about it into doing, identifying challenges that must be addressed, identifying needs of the citizens but also involving citizens in the process of innovation,” Muringani said.
Innovation, he said, should be sustainable, inclusive, ethical, responsive and futuristic, aiming to improve the quality of lives of the ordinary people otherwise it would not be worth it.
SED 2016 is expected to produce a policymaker’s guide and recommendations for consideration and adoption by African governments, their development partners and the private sector; a research and analytical report on “Cities as Hubs of Innovation in Africa” and policy briefs and working papers on STI on the continent.
SED, an initiative of the ECA, is being hosted by the Department of Science and Technology in South Africa. The initiative is designed to support Member States to harness STI to drive their economies
Experts from 21 African countries are attending the SED 2016. South African metros such as the Cities of Tshwane, Johannesburg and Cape Town are also attending.
By Dipo Olowookere
The Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for MTN Nigeria, Mr Babalola Oyeleye, has disclosed that the telecommunications company intends to expand its infrastructure to give its customers quality service.
The demand for connectivity in Nigeria is growing, and with a new forecast predicting the Internet of Things (IoT) market to reach $38.7 billion by 2030, stakeholders, especially operators, are already positioning themselves to dominate the space
Government and private sector investments in digital transformation have created an ecosystem that includes system integrators and security specialists. Industries such as utilities and agriculture are leading the charge, adopting IoT to solve localised problems like power theft and low crop yields.
Currently, 4G coverage has reached approximately 80 per cent of Nigeria’s population, with 5G services already in major cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano. This connectivity backbone is essential for the low-latency communication required by millions of connected devices.
“Reaching the $38.7 billion mark isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about the millions of data points helping Nigerian SMEs and large corporations make smarter decisions every day. Our goal is to ensure the connectivity is there to meet this soaring demand,” Mr Oyeleye noted.
As the ecosystem matures, the focus is shifting toward all-in-one solutions that simplify the user experience. With ongoing investments in NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT) and other low-power connectivity options, the next five years are set to see an explosion in smart city and smart home applications across the country.
By Adedapo Adesanya
South African-founded Refiant AI has raised $5 million to slash the energy footprint of artificial intelligence (AI) in a seed round led by VoLo Earth Ventures, a top climate technology fund.
The startup uses nature-inspired algorithms to radically compress AI models, slashing the hardware and energy required to run them. The new fund will be used to scale Refiant’s team – which already includes a former Google Cloud architect, a Cambridge PhD researcher, and an engineer with NASA experience – to build out a platform and to accelerate enterprise partnerships.
According to a statement shared with Business Post, the company is in active conversations with several multinational technology firms exploring how Refiant’s approach could reduce their AI compute costs while maintaining data and energy sovereignty.
“AI’s growing energy footprint is one of the most urgent and underappreciated challenges in the climate space,” said Mr Sid Gutta, the company’s co-founder. “The industry’s default answer is to build more data centres and consume more power. Ours is to make the AI itself dramatically more efficient.”
The company said it has already successfully demonstrated it can compress a 120 billion parameter AI model to run on a standard laptop, reducing energy requirements by over 80 per cent while preserving near-identical quality. It achieved this to run on a MacBook Pro with just 12GB of RAM. The same model would normally require hardware with at least 80GB of memory. The model retained 95-99 per cent of its fidelity, ran alongside a second AI model on the same machine, and the entire process took four hours with no cloud computing required.
For Refiant, its approach will help businesses reduce their carbon footprint and adopt AI to stay competitive. The energy required to process a single AI prompt on standard infrastructure could power roughly 100 equivalent prompts using Refiant’s approach.
The current breakthrough results were attained at the end of last year, and since then, the team have been gearing up to demonstrate successfully exceeding these results with further compression, longer context windows and model traceability.
“The AI industry is spending hundreds of billions scaling infrastructure when the real breakthrough is the ability to do more with radically less,” said Mr Viroshan Naicker, co-Founder and a mathematician with published research in networks and quantum systems. “Nature doesn’t build by brute force. Evolution optimises. We’ve applied that principle to AI – and the results speak for themselves.”
“AI’s biggest constraint isn’t demand – it’s energy,” added Mr Joseph Goodman, Managing Partner, VoLo Earth. “What’s been missing is a fundamentally more efficient way to compute. Refiant’s architecture replaces brute-force scaling with a far more efficient, nature-inspired approach that lowers energy use while increasing capability. That’s the kind of breakthrough needed to make AI sustainable on a global scale.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
Google and UpSkill Universe, Sub-Saharan Africa’s leading AI and business skills training partner, have announced a major redesign of the Google Hustle Academy programme. For the first time, the free training initiative is open to everyone, not just business owners.
The new curriculum is focused on equipping individuals and entrepreneurs with practical AI skills and comes at a time when small businesses have become the engine of Africa’s economy, creating over 80 per cent of jobs on the continent. To help them grow, the Hustle Academy was launched in 2022, providing bootcamp-style training on business strategy, digital skills, AI, and leadership. The program has since trained over 18,000 SMEs, with many reporting increased revenue and job creation.
Now, as AI reshapes the job market, the program is evolving. The 2026 edition is built for anyone in Sub-Saharan Africa, including employees, students, and job seekers, who want to use AI to advance their careers. To meet the needs of a diverse audience, the new format includes short, 60-minute webinars and more immersive, high-impact bootcamps. These sessions are laser-focused on putting AI to work immediately in areas like digital commerce, marketing, and growth strategy.
Speaking about the academy, Mr Gori Yahaya, Founder & CEO of UpSkill Universe, said, “The 2026 Hustle Academy is designed to close the AI Skills gap with hands-on training that is short, focused, and immediately useful. AI is reshaping how businesses win and how careers are built, right across this continent. We’re excited to renew our partnership, now in its fifth year with Google, combining their global AI leadership with our deep regional AI expertise. The next wave of AI leaders will come from this continent. We are making sure they are ready.”
The Hustle Academy initiative has strengthened digital competitiveness across emerging African economies by enabling SMEs to move beyond AI awareness to practical implementation, positioning them for sustained growth in an increasingly AI-driven business environment.
“We believe that the future of Africa’s digital economy lies in the hands of individuals and entrepreneurs alike. Our new strategy focuses on scaling reach by training individuals in the latest AI-centred tools and techniques,” said a Google representative.
Applications for the 2026 cohort are now open. Interested participants can apply at: https://rsvp.withgoogle.com/events/hustle-academy
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