The African tech ecosystem keeps evolving and of course new developments are sprouting up across the tech world. Here is TGA’s biggest five amongst the interesting tech news in Africa today.
Apple Inc. is considering two options regarding manufacturing its product in China. One, they might move out of the country if the U.S imposes 25% tariffs. Two, stay if the tariffs remains 10%, according to this Bloomberg report. Amidst trade war between U.S. and China, President Donald Trump last month signalled that tariffs could be imposed on smartphones and laptops made in the world’s largest manufacturer of electronics.
Ugandan Healthtech start-up, Matibabu was yesterday included as one of the three entrepreneurs of the Year at the Pitch at Palace Global 3.0 competition. This comes months after winning Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation at the 2018 Palace Africa Pitch. Matibabu’s device tests for malaria parasites without drawing blood and founded by Brian Gitta.
IBM Research and Hello Tractor launches digital wallet for agriculture based on AI and Blockchain in Africa. The mobile platform enables farmers to access tractor services on demand. They will be working with IBM scientists in Kenya to apply several technologies including the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and IBM Cloud, to the app.
UNICEF, through its innovation fund will invest in six blockchain projects in emerging markets, each project will get about $100,000 to develop an open source prototype over the next year. Only Utopixar from Tunisia (Africa) and – Atix Labs from Argentina, Onesmart and Prescrypto from Mexico, Statwig from India, as well as W3 Engineers from Bangladesh – were picked from the pool of over 100 entrants.
Federal Republic of Ambazonia (Southern Cameroons) have built a crypto-currency which according to them, is the first to be fully nation-backed. Dubbed AmbaCoin was formulated and built by some anonymous Anglophone separatist scholars, technocrats and developers. One AmbaCoin sells for 25 cents (circa 140 CFA franc).
Join us tomorrow for more interesting technology news from across Africa.