The BLACK GOLD of the Tech World
January 15th, 1956 marks the first commercial discovery of Crude oil in Nigeria by Shell Darcy (yes, that Shell)... this was a turning point in Nigeria’s economy with an initial production capacity of 5,100 barrels per day, this number increased rapidly over the years, on an average Nigeria produced two million barrels of oil per day over the past 5 years.
We had finally found the Black Gold that rapidly became the foundation for which our economy is built... But Nigeria did not just make name for herself at the arrival of crude oil... Nigeria was known globally for it’s Agricultural prospects... Dating back to 1893 when the Department of Botanical Research was established,
The famous Cocoa house built in 1965 sets the record has the tallest building in tropical Africa at the time, (just to put things in perspective) that’s 6 years before UAE was founded (1971)
I’m not going to bore you with tales of how we were once agricultural superpowers because frankly that isn’t the purpose of this article...
Information Communication Technology (ICT) wasn’t official included into tertiary institutions until the year 2007. As technology advanced globally, so did ICT, Concepts like computer programming were gradually introduced with languages like Fortran, JavaScript, PHP and C++ being major players, with the intervention of companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft to mention a few the knowledge and awareness of software engineering spread across Nigeria and Africa at large.
The likes of Consonance, Google Developers Group, forloop Africa, Laravel Nigeria etc created a platform for the people to learn and share their work, speed walk through 10 years, we have software products in their tens of thousands, Andela is ranked 9th best company to work for in Nigeria according to an article by weetracker.com (link: https://bit.ly/3hRhsDU). We boast of software products ranked on global standards. Nigeria has had significant impact on the global tech sector with nationals spread across the world working for top tech companies... Once again we found a "Black Gold" that has formed the foundation for which our technological sector is built. Most tech communities, events, initiatives seem to be centered around software engineering/ "coding"
But we don’t seem to be getting close to attaining the "developed country" status or even attaining a balanced economy, a goal in which technological advancement has a major role to play... (Lol Is it just me or is there a pattern here?).
It’s almost like every few years mother nature gives us hypothetical proteins to add of our hypothetical stew and then we start binging.
Just like Agricultural, designing and prototyping has been around for ages, you practically cannot invent without designing and prototyping. Computer Aided Design (CAD) dates as far back as 1957, It was introduced by Dr Patrick J Hanratty who developed the PROTON (Program for numerical Tooling Operations) the first commercial CNC programming system, the advent of the computer age has however simplified these things…. Anyways I’ll skip the nerdy talk and show you some figures,
(CAD market size in billion USD https://bit.ly/37YUoP9)
An article published by MarketWatch in April 2020 says “The global software engineering market is expected to grow approximately at USD 37.4 Billion in 2022". Autodesk, a software cooperation that provides digital design softwares for engineers, architects, manufacturers etc was listed as one of the key players in that projection (https://on.mktw.net/2NoaUih).
Companies like Autodesk help reduce the cost of prototyping drastically, in that products, machines, structures etc can be designed and subjected to real life conditions simply by pushing buttons.
Unfortunately 3D modeling and Computer Aided Design (CAD) has been conveniently excluded from our tech society and from our events for some reason that will never be clear to me. It’s almost like these skills don’t exist or are not as important. On the average a minimum of one CAD job is posted on freelancing platforms every 5mins, but most of these jobs have specified locations for applicants because certain locations are believed to have “better designers”. Although we have global CAD Communities like GrabCad, thingyverse etc, The Nigerian/African CAD sector lacks a platform for users to develop their skills and share ideas, it lacks a national body that houses the local talents in the field, ironically the rate of invention and industrialisation majorly depends on the CAD sector.
So in the spirit of discovering a problem and proffering a solution, we have put together a CAD Community called “The Syde Innovative Community” follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/InnovSyde?s=09, our goal is to save CAD in Nigeria/Africa before it’s too late!
LETS SUSTAIN OUR PROTEINS AND STOP THE BINGING...
If I’ve made some kind of sense to you, share this piece. Thanks
