WHAT WE ALL GOT WRONG ABOUT AFRICAN TECHNOLOGY
Africa can be considered the most under-developed continent; Africa seems to be behind in production, economy, but most importantly technology. Nevertheless a few countries in Africa can be said to be developing, South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana are considered to be the top five most technologically advanced countries in Africa. These countries form the bedrock of Africa’s technological advancement.
The above countries are considered technological mainly because of their impact to the IT world or I’ll rather say software engineering world, we have the likes of Mark Shuttleworth who is the CEO Canonical Ltd, the company responsible for the development of the Linux OS, Iroko Partners who have made internet TV much more accessible, just to mention a few. It is unfortunate that technological advancement is now been measured majorly by how well we can “code”. This brings me to the software industry.
The global online presence makes software engineering very important, most of the world’s largest companies are software companies i.e the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Google and soon. So basically everyone that has any innovative intuition nowadays run straight for the software industry, as a result, the growth of the software community in the above mentioned countries can be considered high. These countries have produced software engineering minds that have surprised the world at large. Foreign software engineering gods have paid a few of these countries visits (e.g Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates). I would say that the software engineering aspect of Africa’s technology is growing so fast that the world should watch out.
One reason I feel like African technology will never be fully appreciated is as a result of the above mention fact, the so called technological community in Africa has neglected other aspects of technology. Little or no attention is being given to aspects like infrastructure, design, power and soon, the aspect I will like to emphasize in this article is Computer Aided Designing/Drafting (CAD).
A project that is going to be successful can easily be known by how much we can eliminate unknowns before actual physical presentation. This is why ancient engineers will build small scale models of their design and put it through series of test. Present day engineers have found a way to reduce the stress of actually building a small scale model and even reduced the cost, also they found a way to make tests almost 100% accurate.
This is possible as a result of CAD softwares. High rise buildings, bridges, machine parts, systems are all modeled with these softwares and are put through structural test, dynamical tests, endurance tests and soon. In fact they can be simulated in almost exact real life scenarios to see how effective they will be at production. This has saved a lot of money, lost on failed projects and also speed the production process.
We cannot advance in technology without the impact of CAD. We lack a cooperate body for CAD in this side of reality, I really get surprised when we have tech conferences and events and about 50% is dedicated to software engineering 30% to hardware and basically almost nothing to design. It’s really unsaddling when that which is supposed to be considered one of the biggest aspects to tech is totally being ignored. We forget that without designing there can be no technology!!
