Growth and Opportunities in Africa by Reinhard Schaler and Tunde Adegbola

Opportunities and Growth inAFRICA

Reinhard SchälerLRC/CNGL University of Limerick and The Rosetta Foundation

Tunde AdegbolaAfrican Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i)

“I’ll show you a place - High on a desert plain - Where the Streets have no name” U2

Monday, 26 March 201216:00 – 16:40

Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most-populous continent, after Asia. There are over 2,100 and by some counts over 3,000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families.

Tunde Adegbola

Executive Director, African Languages Technology InitiativeResearch Scientist, Consulting Engineer, Cultural Activist

with wide ranging experience in information and communication media systems and Human Language Technologies

We in Africa do not want to participate in a globalized world in which we have nothing to offer.We need to be able to speak to the world and the world needs to be able to speak to us.

Watch the video: http://bit.ly/Houjnc

Africa The hottest Continent on Earth

Three Stories about Africa

1The Outside Story

2The Inside Story

3The SuccessStory

Africa The Outside Story

Our perceptions

1

What comes to our mind when

we think of Africa?

What is our perception here in the rich North of

the Dark Continent?

The Dark Continent A Disaster Zone

HotSafarisExotic

Great WildlifeNature Reserves

PovertyHunger

WarNatural Disasters

Failed States

The Dark Continent A Disaster Zone

So we’d better keep them outEurope's High-Tech African Fortress

The Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are politically part of Europe, but belong geographically to Africa. For immigrants, they represent the few meters that separate poverty from the chance of a new life. Ever since refugees started scaling the fences en masse six years ago, Spain has used high-tech means to reinforce its border.

Der Spiegel, 08 Oct 2011

2 Africa The Inside Story

Meeting Africa at eye level

3rd Action for Global Information Sharing AGIS ’11, Addis, Ethiopia IDLELO 5 – Abuja, Nigeria

3rd Action for Global Information Sharing

AGIS ’1101-02 December 2011Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

EthiopiaEthiopia's population is 80 million.Population growth rate among top ten countries in the world. Population to grow to over 210 million by 2060.90 individual languages.. 33% speak Amharic (ca. 18m of which 15m are monolingual), 32% Oromo.English: most widely spoken foreign language; medium of instruction in secondary schools and universities. Amharic has been replaced in many areas by local languages such as Oromifa and Tigrinya as the language of primary school instruction.

Action for Global Information Sharing – AGIS ‘11

The Dark Continent turns out to be the hottest, brightest star

The Kamusi Project is a participatory international effort dedicated to the languages of Africa. Our mission is to produce dictionaries and other resources for African languages, and to make those resources available everywhere to everyone. Our goal, simply stated: Every Word in Africa.www.kamusi.org

www.aflat.org

The African Language Technology Network offers a steadily growing collection of bibliographic resources, web links and tools, provided by AfLaT members, including digital corpora, dictionaries and tools for many (formerly) resource-scarce African languages

The African Network for Localisation is run by 11 African partner organizations who believe that ICT needs to be adapted to human languages, including the African languages, in order to enable its use by non-specialists.www.africanlocalisation.net

AGIS ’11 – Framework One-day pre-conference programme• Visit to Addis University & Social

EnterprisesTwo-day main programme• Opened by Ethiopian Minister of IT

& Irish Ambassador• Gala Networking Session• 50 Main & Parallel Sessions on

business, language technologies, mobile access, social localisation, language policy and resources

Two-day post conference field trip• Lalibela and surrounding area200 Participants from Africa, Europe, Americas

Watch the video: http://bit.ly/HcYqlM

Yemirhane Kristos, an ancient monastic settlement 2,800m high up in the mountains of northern Ethiopia.

AGIS ’11There is a vibrant African language and localisation community• Mobile Computing &

CommunicationHigh impact activities• Online Ethiopian Commodity

Exchange in local languages• African-wide UNECA-sponsored

Primary School Local Language Projects

Great interest in collaboration and cooperation• Huge energy and enthusiasm• Solutions are emerging in Africa

for the provision of a strong communications infrastructure

IDLELO 5 – FOSS event,Fantsuam FoundationKafanchan, NigeriaJohn Dada, Programs Directorhttp://www.fantsuam.org/

NigeriaNigeria is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The three largest ethnic groups in Nigeria are the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. Nigeria is roughly split half and half between Muslims and Christians with a very small minority who practice traditional religion. With 170m people, it s the most populous country in Africa, the seventh most populous country in the world, and the most populous country in the world in which the majority of the population is black. It is listed among the "Next Eleven" economies, and is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

What kind of television is this?

We wanted to eradicate poverty by giving money, but we learned very quickly that poverty is much more complex than this.

It all started with two 286 machines from the U.K.

Setting up the very first CISCO Academy in Nigeria.

See, it was about reacting to a need that led to ….

Watch the viedo: http://bit.ly/HwNFdo

Back to the languages

We have languages here that are not documented – some were documented several years ago by expatriates, there was not enough indigenous input.Language is key. I saw the power of language. It’s critical to the work we are doing.Everybody things people in a region just speak one language. Just in this small area here, people speak 12 languages.If I speak to people in their language I can see the difference in the rapport and the understanding. It’s crucial.

See the video: http://bit.ly/Hsr9Si

3 Africa The Success Story

Africa is one of the most dynamic continents on earth

With 600 million mobile phone users, Africa has overtaken America and Europe.

Over the past decade, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African.

In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan.

The Hottest Continent The Future is Here

Her $3 billion fortune makes Oprah Winfrey the wealthiest black person in America

But she is no longer the richest black person in the world. That honour now goes to Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian cement king. Critics grumble that he is too close to the country’s soiled political class. Nonetheless his $10 billion fortune is money earned, not expropriated.

The Dangote Group started as a small trading outfit in 1977. It has become a pan- African conglomerate with interests in sugar and logistics, as well as construction, and it is a real business, not a kleptocratic sham.

The sun shines brightlyAfrica’s economies are consistently growing faster than those of almost any other region of the world.At least a dozen have expanded by more than 6% a year for six or more years. Ethiopia will grow by 7.5% this year, without a drop of oil to export. Once a byword for famine, it is now the world’s tenth- largest producer of livestock. Africa’s GDP will grow by 900 percent, topping out at $15 trillion by 2060 – that’s a shade bigger than the current GDP of the United States.

The Economist, 03 December 2011and African Development Bank 10/2011

Your message – Your voice – Your language

• There is an urgent need to change our perception about Africa and her people.

• Behind the loud noises in the western press about corruption and war, ordinary Africans continue to address the challenges of living in the information age.

• Our relationship with Africa and her people can only work at eye-level, as partners.

Your message – Your voice – Your language

• People in Africa are addressing the challenges they encounter in the digital world.

• Get the message across: Demonstrate the value of language.

• Working together, encouraging responsible & transparent entrepreneurship, collaboration.

• Converting language “barriers” into language opportunities.

The linguistically most diverse continent on the globe, the cradle of humanity and human language, the continent with the world’s fastest economic growth figures, is taking off.The streets of Africa are being named – in languages most of us have not even heard about.

It’s decision time.

Will you join us?

Opportunities and Growth in Africa