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By Oluwaseun Ajayi
President of the Africa Digital Economy Forum (ADEF), Olusola Teniola, this week in Lagos, said ADEF is working towards building a digital economy that will create new job opportunities for the youths and engage them in building sustainable digital communities across the continent.
Teniola said ADEF is fostered on collaborations with key stakeholders to harness new efforts at ensuring the continent’s active participation in the global digital economy.
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Founded at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, ADEF is a non-profit initiative geared towards the realisation of full digitization of Africa’s economies. It draws from a pool of local, international experts and organizations that play in the digital technology space including government bodies and C-level executives in the digital sector.
“Each of the 54 countries in Africa has just started their digital economy journey, so we have an opportunity as ADEF to encourage those multinationals that cut across different countries in Africa, those little society organizations and as well as governments that are willing to leverage digital transformations; share a common goal to drive Africa’s clearly defined digital economy agenda and create employment for our youth,” said Teniola to IT Edge News in an interview.
He added: “We do not want to make the same mistakes in the past where lots of technology provided by manufacturers from outside Africa pulled all the talents, wealth and also removed jobs out of Africa into their own economy. We have another opportunity under the Africa Digital Economy Forum to ensure that we are building a future for the youths in Africa.”
The ADEF draws outstanding support from across the continent and drives digitization across Africa through four channels, namely; intelligence, advocacy, campaigning and fundraising.
“Our commitment makes it essential for us to engage the youths across the continent and create opportunity for them because they are the future. Since Africa is already talking about broadband for over a decade and quite a number of nations are using broadband plans, it is important to make sure that across the demographics everyone including government is actually working together to engage the youths and create a true digital community that benefits Africa,” said the president of ADEF.
According to him, through multi-stakeholders’ approach, ADEF is pushing commitments to the expansion of connectivity, access to affordable data, promotion of innovation and full digitalization of African nations’ economies as the basis for development.
Teniola who also serves as the Nigeria’s National Coordinator of the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a global coalition working to drive down the cost of internet access in low and middle-income countries through policy, said broadband challenges are not insurmountable.
The key is collaboration, said Teniola who is also the immediate president of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON, the umbrella body for ICT companies in Nigeria.
“We are still at a very early stage and to be true to ourselves, there are different organization out there to engage with, I think that’s something we are starting, we recognize many foundations in West Africa and South Africa and in Morocco as well that will lead honest capability and capacities. Our objectives are to continually engage and collaborate. We need to pull other organisations together to go further.
“So in terms of our objectives and our goals, I think the first one in terms of priority is engagement.”
