Brookings Institution: Panel Discussion on the future of work in Africa

It's about harnessing the potential of digital technologies.  The meeting was held at Brookings, Washington, October 17, 2019.  Brookings Fellow Brahima S. Coulibaly and World Bank Executive Director Jean-Claude Tchatchouang introduced a panel who worked on a Report of 2019 on the implications for jobs in Africa of the changing nature of work in the digital era of AI in which we live.  Presenting the report's findings were Mark Andrew Dutz and Zainab Usman of World Bank. Members of the report team joined the discussion: Jieun Choi, Mary Hallward-Driemeier, Albert Zeufack, all of World-Bank; Lemma W. Senbet, Professor, University of Maryland; and Tricida Williams of Mastercard Corporation.

The thrust of the report was to call for a unified demand for innovation and creativity in the use of the computer given the impending dramatic increase in computer power particularly for the hand-held computer.  It also stressed the need for countries in Africa to prepare for emergence of AI intensive usage, citing the need for the country of Chad, as an example, to vastly increase its ability to generate electricity.  As reliance on the digital computer will increase perhaps as much as a hundred fold, so will human productivity, one panelist noted.

And, these jobs will increase salaries of the low-income worker, added Mr. Dutz.

However, while the report listed how Africaners interested in job increase should respond to anticipated rapid innovation, it assumed that the way is clear for digital innovation and program development.  However, during the Q &A segment (and at a Congressional committee meeting on the computerization by youth in the US the day before), complaints against large computer giants who generate innovative programs and code were iterated--centering around the refusal of these corporations to share their innovative code and procedures with the computerworld, citing patent security.

This is the same problem that China seems to be currently lodging against the American computer giants.  This despite the apparent fact that early on in the infancy of the field, the government insisted that IBM make known to those involved in creating software, i.e., the general public, their processes and code, so that other programs could be created that would make use of them as platforms.