With Flutterwave achieving a unicorn status raising $170 million at over $1 billion valuation in the tech space and BurnaBoy and Wizkid winning the prestigious Grammy Award recently, the growth and innovation in Africa’s young talent pool has challenged and contradicted previous narratives.
Despite the glaring weaknesses in Africa’s governance and social structure, great strides have been recorded. Across Africa, young citizens have come of age and have earned a place as major stakeholders in building a new continent of our dreams.
In Africa, we need better infrastructure to reach our full potential. Sadly, the infrastructure deficit due to inadequate investments is compounded by another problem. All too often, we have seen protests/riots lead to a reckless destruction of public and private infrastructure in major cities across Africa. To bring about a transformation, we must recognize that infrastructure is basically of two kinds, namely: human infrastructure and physical infrastructure. An African adage says, if we refuse to build a child’s useful capacity, he will end up to destroying the building we have erected. Two choices confront our youth: they will come to our window, either to fix it or break into it.
This reinforces the urgent need for a maintenance-cultured campaign from the point of view of Infrastructure asset management. There is need for a digitalized management of public infrastructure assets across its lifecycle and the integration of our youth into our maintenance culture/strategy. The strident complaints about increasing unemployment among Africa’s youth population can to a large extent be tackled by focusing seriously on bridging the yawning gap between human and physical infrastructure. Michael Bloomberg put it very clearly by saying “We can only create good jobs if we make smarter investment in infrastructure.” Over the years, we the African continent, have failed as a collective to leverage ourstrategic advantage, the human asset.
The expansive infrastructure asset management space (construction, energy, transportation, healthcare, education, Oil & Gas, recycling, water, security etc.) offers a great opportunity to do just that. Through the implementation of policies and scientific resource allocation the international community, domestic government and the private sector can create sustainable infrastructure management ecosystems that will fit our youth into a very wide range of vocations within its value chain from data collection & digitization to the professional cadre of engineers, architects, builders andcertified & accredited skilled artisans etc. By strategically and holistically investment in upskilling the labor forcealong gender sensitive initiatives, the energies of local youth can be ploughed towards development and maintenance of Public and private Infrastructure Assets within their vicinity/provinces. Giving our human infrastructure a sense of ownership, belonging and tangible socio-economic emancipation.
