1 Foreword
Technology, innovation and entrepreneurship for Africa’s economic transformation
Africa is leapfrogging traditional development pathways using technology. Digital financial technologies driven by mobile money innovations, for example, have accelerated financial inclusion beyond what traditional banks could offer a few decades ago. Indeed, the 2016 study by Tavneet Suri and William Jack showed that increased access to mobile money has reduced poverty in Kenya, particularly among female-headed households. The rapid expansion of mobile money, the report says, has lifted an estimated 2% of Kenyan households (some 194,000 individuals) out of extreme poverty. It has also enabled 185,000 women to transition from subsistence farming into business. It is a similar situation across Africa, where innovation is creating new job opportunities among the youth as they develop solutions in the health, financial, and education sectors. Yet even with these benefits, innovators in the continent still face several structural and operational challenges in building and scaling their ventures, including cumbersome regulations, insufficient digital talent, limited funding, and fragmented markets.
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