In an interview on the sidelines of the AIBC summit in Malta, Crypto AM’s founder James Bowater, and World Mobile Chain’s Founder & CEO Micky Watkins shared their intention on how they plan to usher in the communication technology in Africa.
They spoke at length about their wish to drive adoption and to unlock the global digital economy in Africa. Talking about their passion project, Bowater said that while attending the summit and its companion piece Cannabiz World, he always wanted to unite credible people such as Micky Watkins, Akon, to drive home their dream project of making Africa tech-savvy. He reveals Micky’s vision to create a mesh network in Africa to facilitate inexpensive communication and enable people to use blockchain at the same time.
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So, consequently, a panel titled “A Sleeping Giant: Driving Mass Adoption in Africa” was created that comprised Electroneum’s founder Richard Ells, Micky, Akon, Rod Alexander from IOHK, Charles Hoskinson, who are all passionate about making technological advancements in Africa.
Inclusion Over Adoption
Elaborating on the key elements that would be discussed on the panel, Micky, however, made a cogent point on the panel’s topic of ‘mass adoption’ by addressing it as ‘mass inclusion.’ He emphasized on the fact that since more than 53% of the world lags in communication, and that out of 1 billion sub-Saharan Africa, over 850 million people are without connectivity, providing communication at super low cost would be rather a mark of ‘inclusion’; though mass adoption is desirable for blockchain, unlocking the disenfranchised in the process, with keeping education at the heart of everything, would be an effective way to include uncollected villages. Speaking of education, it surfaced that Akon has been running some amazing educational pieces for Ethiopian and Uganda women.
He further added how they are trying to generate an ecosphere conducive to mass inclusion; by adopting license-exempt platforms such as television, white spaces, CBS which in turn would reduce the cost of building telephone infrastructure and enable their goal of mass adoption and inclusion, thereby benefiting not only the Western world, the African continent, but also, the rest of any underdeveloped nation.
And to materialize that dream, in the words of Bowater, they are trying to tow in usability, scalability, interoperability, education; and that the discussion with the eminent people in the panel would go on to demonstrate the potential of their passion project.
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It would be interesting to watch what pans out from the synergy of such distinguished personalities in the panel.
