Africa Fintech Foundry (AFF), an initiative that aims to nurture, fund, and accelerate the growth of Tech startups in Africa has launch a television show, ‘The Big Tech Show’.
The television documentary show launched in collaboration with Accelerate TV is aimed at exposing innovators and creating awareness on how African start-ups are using technology to solve problems.
Africa Fintech Foundry (AFF) is a pan-African initiative focused on creating new opportunities in Africa by providing a platform designed to inspire and challenge African innovators and entrepreneurs.
Speaking at the launch of the show in Lagos, Ade Bajomo, executive director of technology and operations, Access Bank, said that The Big Tech Show is basically to showcase the best that Africa have got. “We are building an ecosystem and that ecosystem is at the infancy stage as such we have to expose it.
“Show how innovators are throwing up the innovations, show how they are solving the problems. Now nerds rule the world because they are solving difficult problems. This is part of celebrating Africa and this programme goes around to Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria,” he said.
According to him, “the role of AFF is basically to stay out there and look at the entire ecosystem across Nigeria and Africa as a whole and look for innovators across all fields and see how we can partner to develop solutions that can solve real deep problems.
“It can be for financial services, Agrictech, Insurtech or in solving social responsibility issue. It is about bringing that collaboration, that is why AFF is set up to find those Innovators, starts up, creative people fuse their ideas together and bring it back into the ecosystem.
“There are two things that changed the narrative in Nigeria, first one is Nollywood without support from anywhere became third in the world. The second is Afrobeat and the third one is developing and that is what we are doing here.
“The role of AFF is also to build that ecosystem, articulate all the issues in the ecosystem make them accessible, get more people to join the ecosystem and promote the ecosystem to fully develop so that Africa becomes the hub of digital innovation and for us to be solving our own problems in the fourth, fifth and six industrial revolution across the world”.
Uzoma Dozie, chief executive officer, Sparkle, described The Big Tech Show initiative as a very noble initiative. “What AFF is trying to do is to expo and create awareness of how many countries across Africa are trying to leverage on technology to make life better for their own people.
“Secondly, we need African organisations doing expose’ of what Africans are doing, you can’t expect Americans or Europeans to be doing it, let us take control of the narratives. That is exactly what The Big Tech Show is doing here. I think it is wonderful,” he stated.
On Impact of Fintech in Africa, Dozie said that Africa has not started in exploring Fintech. “They will always say that the biggest example of Fintech impact is in Nairobi with M-pesa. Where they used mobile money to effect change on how people transfer and changed their life.
“In Nigeria, we have seen that as well, but we haven’t talked about it enough. We need to do much more, Nigeria is a much bigger country with over 200 million people though with infrastructure challenges. We have education, health and Agriculture. These are areas where technology can play a role.
“From financial perspective Nigeria has done very well in FinTech, we have better mobile financial Apps than you can find in Europe but we need to use it to impact more life to go down on the pyramid. We are doing well, we have great creativity and entrepreneurship, we just need more collaboration between the private sector, regulators and legislatures for us to now build these skills. We need a common denominator. Right now, we are all working in silos.
“This kind of Big Tech Show would create that awareness among people in different stakeholder’s group. When you see what other countries are doing you ask yourself how come we are not doing this in Nigeria but we are actually investing in technology but how come it is not reaching the man on the street. What do we need to do? That might force us to come together to collaborate and find solution.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, cofounder, general partner – Future Africa, said that a lot of younger entrepreneurs need an encouragement and mentorship. “This show is going to help to inspire them so that they can see how people who did it before did it perhaps they will have an opportunity to follow in their steps.
“It is interesting that the bankers have decided to tell the stories of these entrepreneurs through collaboration between AFF and Accelerate TV,” he noted.