LocationsDriving a Thriving Digital Innovation Ecosystem: UNDP Cameroon’s Role in the 2024 Cameroon International Tech Summit (CITS)
November 21, 2024
UNDP-CMR-National Hackathon- Cameroon International Tech Summit (CITS)-2024 UNDP-CMR-National Hackathon- Cameroon International Tech Summit (CITS)-2024
In a century where harnessing the potential of innovation and digital technologies is critical for building strong digital ecosystems, nations across the globe, including Cameroon, must take matching actions to address the challenges affecting the achievement of the 2030 SDGs.
Six years left to realizing the vision of Agenda 2030, the future is undoubtedly not certain with complex and ever-changing challenges. Are these uncertainties ever going to cease? Unfortunately, not! Can Countries, development actors, governments, private sector actors, and communities adapt their actions to suit the needs or demands of these complexities? Absolutely! This can make a whole lot of difference for future generations and the future we want!
Cameroon's Digital Divide: Challenges and Opportunities
In Cameroon, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications is responsible for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Despite significant challenges such as limited internet access in rural areas, high internet costs for individual users, and a gender digital divide, with an overall proportion of internet users in the Country estimated at 34% compared to 77% literacy rate, the country is striving to embrace digital transformation.
The Government, as the primary driver of development, is at the forefront of these digital transformative actions. Recent initiatives include the modernization of government consular services, the issuance of biometric visas, and the building of a Digital Transformation Centre for the Ministry of External Relations. Not forgetting recent actions that were taken up by the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms earlier this year in partnership with the Country Office Governance unit, supported by the Accelerator Lab team. Precisely, actions taken to re-imagine the modernization of public service administrations, with a focus to improve quality and user experience within public offices.
Development actors strive to challenge the status-quo of communities? especially of young people. They organize digital and innovation competitions to encourage youth participation in digital development and decision-making processes in their Country. Young people are increasingly interested in entrepreneurship and innovation, as evidenced by their participation in digital and innovation competitions. The integration of these topics into higher education further empowers the next generation of leaders. This youthful energy and creativity are essential for building a thriving digital ecosystem. In summary, young people remain at the centre of every opportunity identified to build a thriving digital ecosystem."
Implication of these trends for the Cameroon Innovation Ecosystem
Be it from a gender digital divide perspective or the existing rural-urban digital divide, nationwide, infrastructural limitations more or less explain these realities. However, there are some internally observed ecosystem gaps, such as unhealthy competition, little or no collaboration, working in silos, and an obvious quest for ecosystem power amongst actors. Despite these hurdles, the most detectable and possible future right now is to leverage existing opportunities to bridge these gaps.
UNDP-CMR-A representation of young people from the Northern Region of Cameroon present at the CITS: Credit-2024
Despite the progress made towards achieving the SDGs at national level, it is important to highlight that efforts towards leaving no one behind, addressing structural transformation, and building communities’ resilience will not be possible without a digital takeover. Moreover, if only 40.8% of Cameroon’s population is non-poor and non-vulnerable, it means at least 59.2% of its population is vulnerable to poverty. Therefore, addressing poverty means we must be ready for change. To address change, we must be willing and able to push boundaries that favour digital innovation.
Based on the UN’s 2.0 vision to support member states in the 21st century, “innovation cultures embrace challenges as opportunities to design ground-breaking sustainable solutions”. Therefore, fostering innovation capacity is about learning to generate, test, and scale up novel ideas, processes, products, or services that create value. This exactly was one of the added values seen throughout the design and implementation process of the CITS at the level of the regions and during the national hackathon. Generation of new ideas, learning to work in teams, testing new products in real-time, while understanding what works and what doesn’t.
DOWN THE ROAD TO THE CITS: UNDP CAMEROON BOARDS THE TRAIN TO SUPPORT ONE THOUSAND YOUNG DIGITAL ARMIES.
This was a journey of 1000 miles that began with a step.
In January 2024, Mountain Hub, one of Cameroon’s leading digital innovation ecosystem hubs, through its CEO, Ayuk Etta had the conviction that there was a need to restructure the Cameroon innovation digital ecosystem. Together with his team, Mountain Hub set out on a regional tour to identify digital talents across the ten regions of the Country. Peculiar to Ayuk’s strategy was to redefine the mindset of traditional ecosystem actors, avoiding doing business as usual. Curious about the unknown, such an ambitious journey for the Mountain Hub team was to identify digital talents, and skills from unusual spaces, make young people believe in their ability to rewrite their stories as community changemakers, and most especially push young men and women to unleash their full potential in well-designed settings like hackathons, pitch master classes, investors meet ups, green poetry, etc.
In Ayuk’s words, “the vision was to help young people know that they could dream and that their dreams were valid.” He believed it was possible to create magic with young people, which in the last ten months earned him the title “The Magic Man.”
UNDP-CMR-DRR of UNDP handing first price to the winners of the Buea city Hackathon-2024
It should be noted that, before the design of the CITS from the regional hackathons to the national hackathon, which took place last October 24th to 30th 2024, certain regions of the Country felt left out or hardly participated during the design and implementation process of similar innovative programmes or events. The consequences of such an ignorant or unintentional practice we the non-visibility or representation of certain regions in such national or regional innovation events, missed opportunities for young people and communities whose potentials were unintentionally untapped, reduced networking opportunities for young graduates, entrepreneurs, and innovators, fewer growth opportunities and much more. The organization of digital ecosystem activities over the years have mainly been concentrated in cities such as Yaoundé, Douala and Buea.
Once UNDP steps in to support the CITS journey from Yaoundé, Douala, Buea, and then the National Hackathon, this becomes the game changer towards attracting new and unusual partners, reinforcing collaboration amongst key innovation actors within the ecosystem, building new partnerships for the purpose of fostering innovation, promoting inclusive participation of men and women in digital spaces, while providing young people with the necessary resources and tools to exercise their full potential and make informed decisions about their future career paths.
UNDP-CMR-Best All-female Price Award, Douala Innovation Week-2024
In the words of most of the young participants, “UNDP’s involvement in the CITS journey was instrumental towards giving us a new hackathon mindset experience, different from what we had experienced with other actors in the past.” Referring to the comfort experienced on accommodation, feeding, knowledge sharing experience, etc. throughout the process.
WHAT MADE THE CITS UNIQUE, AND HOW DID UNDP’S INVOLVEMENT AND PARTICIPATION AS A KEY PARTNER MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR THE WIDER ECOSYSTEM?
CITS was unique in its approach to addressing local challenges through digital innovation. By focusing on regional-specific problems, the hackathons empowered young people to become solution providers for their communities. Every region brought together 125 young people grouped into 25 teams of five to reflect on pertinent digital solutions affecting their communities.
In the Grand North for example, challenges framed targeted solutions around digital health, climate smart agriculture, and technology talent acceleration and outsourcing. This region is known for its vulnerability to climate change due to a severe lack of reforestation and the advancement of the desert; among other things, this zone mainly depends on agriculture. However, agriculture in this zone (Far-North, North, Adamawa) remains exposed to rising temperatures and drought, explained by the drier and hotter conditions which cause desertification, with damaging weather effects which contribute to the rising level of poverty in the region and food insecurity.
In the Littoral Region, on the other hand, participants from the region worked on urban mobility, circular economy, and digital trade solutions, while the participants from the Centre Region hacked digital solutions to address governance challenges. Douala being the economic capital and Yaoundé the political capital, these challenges identified for the youth to explore solutions on have remained pertinent challenges affecting these two big cities of the Country respectively, from traffic congestion to waste management challenges where waste piles are commonly found in almost every area of these big cities.
Based on the above examples, which guided the selection criteria for the challenges participants worked on, it is evident that these challenges exist, are visible, and are very complex to handle.
UNDP-CMR-Poorly managed waste site in the city of Douala-2024
UNDP Cameroon’s involvement in the CITS was instrumental in fostering a vibrant digital ecosystem in Cameroon. By providing technical expertise, financial support, and strategic guidance, UNDP played a crucial role in the success of the event. The commitment to empower digital ecosystems and allow innovation to flourish sparked the right partnerships and provided opportunities to tap intelligence from diverse communities for a more holistic problem-solving approach.
By leveraging the potential of young people to unlock the power of digital technologies for sustainable solutions to development challenges, UNDP’s digital transformation vision is directly influencing some of the key strategic areas of Governments 2020 digital strategy such as promoting a digital culture by spreading the use of ICT or technology in society, which UNDP leads on through hackathons and the support of youth entrepreneurship and innovation programmes, strengthening digital self-awareness, and promoting the development of a local digital industry whereby, research and innovation, including the development of human capital and leadership skills in digital technology is prioritized.
UNDP-CMR-Pitch Friday Event, Buea Innovation Week-2024
Lessons Learned from the Cameroon International Tech Summit
Young men and women remain at the centre of experimentation, innovation, and research in Cameroon. Most of the participants (132 females and 217 males) of the hackathon were students from different national public and private universities. This is a clear indication to continuously engage academia in development actions and provide support to initiatives such as UNIPODS, Innovation Hubs, and other digital and technological events that seek to enhance the skills and competencies of youth and provide them with available information, tools, and resources to make informed decisions around the use and access of emerging technologies.
Engagement of development actors like UNDP in such ecosystem events builds trust and engagement for other actors to get involved. UNDP’s participation in the CITS attracted interest from the UN Cameroon team, with technical and financial support from sister agencies like UNFPA and WFP. Also, internally within UNDP, programme units were keen on facilitating innovative talks with young people like the UNV Country team and programmes that found direct links between the hackathon themes and the key focus areas of their programmes.
The Summit helped to re-invent the dynamics of traditional ecosystem innovation events in the Country, where focus has always been in cities like Yaoundé, Douala, and Buea. It provided an opportunity for a more holistic approach to identify and source talents, giving a chance for young men and women even in the most marginalized or hard-to-reach communities to participate in tech initiatives and networks and connect to new opportunities.
With the right partners on board, it is possible to secure funding opportunities for innovative solutions, products, or services. The summit connected at least five innovative solutions to funding opportunities in return for some equity percentage share for the investor.
For private sector organizations like Ejara, a lead Cameroonian FINTECH, who were partners to the event, their target was to scan for talents in development and design amongst the young people present. So, to say, such events are an opportunity for young people to showcase their true potential, and in exchange, get real-time employment offers that suit their aspirations and needs.
Investing in and for the future starts now. The solutions that 70 teams of five persons brought forth within just 72-hours revealed that start-ups remain at the core of enterprise or business development. The ideal industry development and innovation process should be initiated at the level of start-ups. Missing out or failing to invest in the start-up process is more like planning to have failed systems. Governments and key development actors are called to adopt an experimental approach to development, investing in start-ups that hold the solutions to the challenges communities face today.
UNDP-CMR-Pitch Session during the Buea Innovation Week-2024
FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
There is still much to be done for these 1000 identified young talents.
The vision to build 70 digital start-ups in the next one to two years remains valid. The different teams will need continuous technical and financial support from diverse partners to help bring all the amazing prototypes to life for testing in various capacities.
Specifically, there will be a need to continuously finance, test, adjust, and re-adjust some of these solutions to enable them to attain the maturity stage for increased profitability and market readiness to generate new jobs.
Also, there are plans to explore ways of scaling and integrating some of these solutions into projects/programs within UNDP and other UN agencies, the private sector, Government, and other interested parties. UNFPA for example worked with female teams during the hackathon to identify digital health solutions in areas of sexual reproductive health rights, protection of online body rights, and more.
If you are ready to support, then we are ready to promote and scale new and unprecedented solutions that address challenges that cut across the seventeen (17) SDGs.
If we look after our start-ups like we do for the engines of our vehicles, then we would understand that neglecting to promote or invest in our start-ups is indirectly neglecting the engines of our vehicles, with an obvious consequence to stay backwards, continuously using 19th century solutions to address 21st century challenges.
Author: Anna Ojong, Head of Solutions Mapping, UNDP Cameroon Accelerator Lab, Contributors: Audrey Moneyang, Head of Exploration, Tchoffo Serge Roberto, Head of Experimentation
