Three important development conversations are trending in the rest of the world, except, to a large extent, in Africa:
- The transformation of transportation: electric cars (and solar powered recharging infrastructure that recharges a car in the time it takes to fill a tank with fuel); Elon Musk’s underground tunnels through which he is creating highways that transport vehicles; Flying cars (that perennial dream for futurists) with vertical take off and landing (VTOL); self-driving cars, planes and cargo ships; cargo/packet delivery using drones….
- The race to colonise space: Competition to establish colonies in Mars; The possibility of mining Helium-3 (a clean, non-radioactive energy source that could potentially power nuclear fusion reactors) on the moon; research on how the absence of gravity can affect organisms; developing crumb free bread so astronauts can eat sandwiches in space…
- Next generation science in nearly all spheres of life: How a bionic bone implant could give arthritis the elbow; tattoos that monitor blood sugar; a concoction of vitamin C + antibiotics as an alternative cancer treatment; an artificial tongue that can tell you if you are drinking counterfeit whiskey; 2D magnets that are just one atom thick (a key building block to the development of super slim electronics); snake venom to replace aspirin for heart disease patients; Artificial intelligence (robots; drones, et al) and the internet of things.
Granted, some of these pursuits may be beyond our league currently, in view of our level of development. We may not be actively trying to send a colony of residents to Mars, but there are many of these possibilities that should be occupying us. Consider three:
- Tools to create custom AI bots: A conversation I held with a ‘futuristic’ dentist who was seated next to me in a plane not long ago is illustrative: he was developing a robotic arm that could do inside the mouth of a patient all that a dentist does, including to the root canal — only better. His biggest challenge: finding programmers, a service that my organisation could, and can, provide. At another level, consider school level involvement: simple AI toolkits, for example bots capable of 3D printing, to enable our high school kids to make play things such as animated “puppies” or “walking tables…. The impact of such exposure would, in time, leapfrog to near peer-level status in the future we are currently leaving to be ruled by developed nations.
- Automation of agriculture, small scale: Think of the revolution we could introduce in our agriculture by introducing tiny, GPS-guided ploughs and planters that can service the needs of a quarter acre farmer – now the majority in most agricultural rural areas? I personally live in a tea-growing area where we could use automatic tea plucking machines (that cost just KES 30,000), but are forbidden by the Kenya Tea Development Authority, citing quality and human labour considerations. Reminds of the the time when former President Daniel arap Moi disallowed the use of computers in order to protect type-writing copy-typists.
- Allowing (licensing) the use of drones: There are many to drone based activities. An example: Surveying. All over the world, surveyors are increasingly adopting the use of drones: to reduce data collection time; to improve accuracy; to minimise the risks staff face working in sloppy territories or in mines.
And Kenyans know of these advantages. As at August last year, according to an article in the Daily Nation, requests to government for licensing of drones — for drone-based transport services alone — had grown to at least 1,000. But the law was behind the demand. Happily, the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA), at last in February 2017 created a legal framework for the commercial use of Aerial Unmanned Vehicles (AUVs), aka drones, making Kenya the second country in the region, after Rwanda, to embrace this development. Bravo.
This list is not exhaustive. I have only highlighted three examples to illustrate, in ascending order, things we can do at our home and school level without requiring government approvals, except perhaps integrating their use in the curriculum; things we can use practically in our farms farm; and things that require government’s overhaul of legal obstacles by fast-tracking regulatory frameworks.
Haron Wachira 