Hello and welcome to the d w debate of the World Economic forum to our viewers watching us from home were coming to you from the most visited city in Africa Cape Town my name is edith cumani now according to u. N. Figures by the year 2050 every 2 out of 4 people will be african thats quite staggering when you think about it does that then mean that if the population is going to quadruple here that our data will also quadruple and what does that mean for the future of data on the continent this morning were asking the question is data africas new oil and im going to be helped to answer that by my Student Panel and im going to be introducing that now im joined by sue. Im a carrier on my extreme right to the head of geospatial technologies and the cofounder of have to analytics based in kenya but also joined by mr alex q who is the managing partner and chairman at 80 kearney if youve been to the World Economic forum a few times you might have seen his face on my right my immediate right is mr morris on ms he is the managing director and the head of the center for the 4th Industrial Revolution right here at the World Economic forum host and also doubling up as a panel member thank you and last but not least france corneas is the cofounder and chief executive officer of date for profit based here in south africa thank you all for joining us. So moret let me start with you were asking the question is data africas or oil why that comparison is that even a fair one. I would go a step further and say data is the oxygen oxygen for the. 4th and thats a revolution because if you look at the developments an Artificial Intelligence particularly around 2016 with very little data we have demonstrated that we can crack the consulate is some of the most difficult challenges we face today from increasing our grid culture yields reducing Energy Consumption improve improving congestion and maybe accelerate to cure for cancer and data is the source for a lot of these potential developments so in our view in my view there is the oil its probably the oxygen or the 4th Industrial Revolution and theres a huge potential as you say in africa were talking about potential but france your someone whos actually already harnessing the power can you talk to me about what you do what data absolutely so a lot of the work that we do at that profit focuses on analyzing manufacturing data which is a really interesting field when you look at the amount of data created is manufacturing is the sectors in fact that uses the most amount of data rich it was in the african context and shocked the way will save the manufacturing hubs across the us from africa its silver youre also doing something similar and have to analytics and theres an interesting article you wrote about how data is already helping us fight Climate Change in africa correct so id have to analytics what we are focusing on we worked with a wonderful government and most particularly the Agricultural Ministry in harnessing the data in collaboration we said late imageries to ensure that they have the correct information and where particular crops are being planted saw for Climate Change but then the data. Countries or organization determine when to plant and when not to plant therefore awaiting west saw in that manner you are trying to tackle the whole idea of Climate Change and ensuring that you transcend that by using beater to to make sure youre making better does the seans are the right thing so if on the hierarchy of needs data and the human touch which comes 1st. Morra thats where you for me i think they go together because with data we can really have Human Centered Solutions and data is not just coming from people obviously its important but theres a potential as we heard before to harness data from things as well and if you combine things that environmentalists lifestyle data personal data we can create a data economy that benefits the people of africa and also create the environment for startups and create opportunities for young people to get into new fields alex i want to come to you now because were talking in the context of africa these startups weigh in one of the biggest hobbs right now but these technicians have often limits and even city or enterprise level how do we make sure that africa as a whole is enjoying the benefits if you think about the data as a Strategic AssetJust Like Oil and oxygen youve got to create it youve got to collect it and youve got to protect it and if data is like oil what would you do if someone was taking your Oil Every Day selling it back to you and you could protect it you could protect the pipes and i think thats the issue for africa to unlock the potential is not just finding the right best applications for the future learning from the world having the Public Private partnerships in iraq octave out but also having a sensible data framework what are the rules who owns nato who decides who owns the data who prices the data who collects the data where do you stored safely and in a safe environment i think we can come about later i think there are some areas to deep bottleneck for africa that allows more cross border trade clear rules on data authenticating customers and suppliers and transactions and the like so theres a little bit of on this topic i think theres 2 parts of my brain optimism and theres also why theres a lot of things that need to change in order to take advantage of the summit. Applications ok so let me stay with you youre saying we need a little bit of skepticism when it comes to the issue of data at the moment are we applying that balance correctly i think we need more than skepticism i think a fair amount of paranoia. You know data is a weapon and if you dont think you own the data now you someone else owns it and if you dont collect and protect it someone already has it. Just this past week we talked about google identifying obviously they have a conflict of interest in some senses saying i phone for 2 years you had a malware that was spying on you right we have all the sort of global trade issues regarding sort of whos spying on whom in terms of equipment in the technology of the 4th Industrial Revolution. I think facebook just had to pay a 200000000. 00 fine for allowing players bad players to sort of violate child privacy laws so the intrusion of data data is borderless and some of our laws are within countries and theres 54 countries here and in africa and as i looked at the figures in 2019 of the 54 countries only 24 had any form of formal data legislation in terms of frameworks for how to how to create collect and protect it and the rest either have draft legislation no legislation or no data so thats its not skepticism its sort of we have to get our act together as a continent in the context of the Free Trade Agreement and the spirit of collaboration to be able to enable this cross border vision intra regional bloc that Everyone Wants to create the jobs and the like all right so we i want to come to you because were saying the data is that weve actually gone as far as saying that it is the oxygen on the 40 duster of what you said but how do you make something valuable that everyone has access. Thank you so currently as we look at it from there have turned electrics perspective is in the african continent and most particularly african governments we have a lot of legacy technologies that do not have the potential to harness the data that is required for them to make valuable and quality decisions so currently we advice anybody who wants to get into that space to to the point where they are going to analyze that data is do you want to have the infrastructure that is going to one is this data so we have to start with the infrastructure that is going to enable you to acquire the kind of detail youre going to analyze at the end of the d. Then from that point is then when you decide which kind of insights youre going to draw for you to make the kind of decisions you want to make so more outlets come to you because silver has already touched on some of the challenges in your mind one of the big ones for africa when it comes to collection and management of storage of data and i want to comment on what. And i agree with your because theres a risk that nations or continents that generate that are important to. Potential good use for their citizens and countries using Artificial Intelligence and deep learning will take off and theres a risk that those countries will have the data but cannot harness it because of lack of technology or dont have the data will be forever left behind so we will see a world where those countries will jump forward and others will have the potential of permanently falling behind so thats an opportunity and a challenge we have so the idea is to really create the infrastructure to generate data and this is where technologies like 5 g. And internet of things come into play but i think it needs to be a National Strategy not left to individual companies because its too big and if you can instrument the fields if we can instrument the oceans we can collect a lot of data and improve our great culture as i mentioned oceans and health and in terms of who owns the data who makes money out of it if you look at some of the Platform Companies their market valuations are bigger than the g. D. P. s of all african countries so theres value in the data the question is how to turn that into value for the owners of the data who gets decided so we have a theory it was actually inspired by rely on musician oh and his and i have been here yes so we work with people on the panel and he said their outlook any time somebody uses my music i get residual value out of it what can we do it for data ok well come to that idea in just a short 2nd but everyone seems to be talking about infrastructure france do you feel that the South African government is supporting you in the sector or are you by yourself. Its its from a Data Infrastructure component its quite interesting especially kind of coming out of an african context in the sense that all of a bit of processing is actually offshore we dont have the necessary infrastructure weve got the history infrastructure to move data but not actually process it and so when you look at the big data servers. As in with their web services its with microsoft none of the senses on africa yet it gradually thats beginning to change and as of the beginning of this year in fact marks up has begun to build data centers but even then its very much focused within south africa and not within a broad a context right so how do we contract ourselves in this virtual order from being raw data print youth to being lucky if he does attention me. Its its a its a difficult thing for its the 1st one and i carry with sylvia and has tightened that earlier with we actually need to implement the infrastructure that creates a lot of the data and right now were working all. Old infrastructure which isnt producing the data in a manner that is set up for good purposes and then once youve created that almost those pipes its all lets talk about within the oil and energy you want to create the. Extraction of oil from the ground in this context the extraction of data then youve created the demand for the refinery which all of these process incentives that yeah i was going to i mean there is a real world example thats being rolled out even yesterday by the Regional Business council the World Economic forum which is called the Africa Growth platform so it takes morass point about taking a Global Platform that small and Medium Business and entrepreneurs in africa young and old millennial then generation 0 or older than that like me can actually enable collaboration get some of the best tools and the like its tight and and the founders of this consortium are very intriguing youve got ali baba then at the bank were very lucky to be a part of it as well dahlberg in a few others that i dont have the names right here but i mean its very exciting and thats something that government Public Private partnerships can build a platform to enable to jobs and also protect and nurture the small and medium sector which i think is the heart beat of any condominium but especially for africa since we dont have you dont have the the global export economics that east asia had 20 years ago its really got to be africa for africa and this type of platform taking the best the technologies and the best energies of entrepreneurs like here can make it work as a great example i think its its real time but i mean at the moment those platforms dont exist so the real question where it is where. Who has it and what are they doing with it theres not much straight out the moment it. Needs to be extracted and collected and its an opportunity and right and i think data and infrastructure should be treated as electricity roads and Health Care Like high priority strategy strategic infrastructure for the government so the potential is there that is locked up theres not much of it and thats the huge upside and theres also the Downside Risk and if we dont do it Small Medium Enterprises wont be able to keep up. You know almost im jumping in. Our green totally with the idea that data dont play right now is locked up its in storage its not it hasnt been built to be used by data 1st is right its been built for complaints perspective right. So its to say the Insurance Industry as a Insurance Company i need to report to some governing body as to my life but thats right im going to collect just the set of data that is required to answer that question and im going to store it in that Data Warehouse without any context all of the people that are potentially enrolled on muncher its products right and thats how ive designed wont take infrastructure i havent designed it to law say other enterprises or even within my own and tries to consider hall i can use the state to to create further value it just looked at it from my reporting perspective and its almost when you look at that infrastructure you can see 2 mindsets and really theres an older one which centers on going to risk the state so were going to store it you can always going to reference that its not set up to interact with simply and then theres a shifting mindset towards actually data can continue secret if you build it in a manner where you can give it the necessary context you can kind of think a little bit wider than just the narrow compliance questions you need to answer so that that brings me back to more at and this idea that you have having a Central Place where people can band one trade data. So our case is that if you treat data as a commodity much like oil and allow for people to share their data ourselves our data the question is how do you value the thing because it doesnt have built in value so we said what if we again taking off from what i am spying research how do we create value assigned value to data when it doesnt have it. Intrinsic value so we said how do you value coffee or oil or tea or any minerals that theres a system called commodity exchanges so we said what if we trade data but you cannot trade data because of privacy and volume so we said can we create an alternative kind of a reference and here technology is like block chain come in handy we can create a token exchange so the idea is let me give an example and south africa an african continent has a large gene pool diverse and if you can collect their bodies genetic data i think most of us would volunteer to give it free of charge for curing cancer. But if somebody wants to build a medicine i want to have my consent asked for and im paid so if you can touch the data and i can say if i can put on my data like music anyone wanting to use it for Cancer Research can use it for ever i dont want to know money but for other purposes as for my consent we can actually do that technically so when somebody launches a Cancer Research application im thinking about an app store that is certified the data it makes itself available but if its for Drug Discovery i get notified i say you can use it for 6 months and then because my data is traded at an Exchange Using the proxy i get paid the value for that purpose and it goes up and down and they can trace it back to me so i get paid and the finance ministers are happy because they can tax the transaction so it creates a equitable platform and it benefits the owners of the data not just the Platform Companies and it also allows for startups to come in and harness the power of data and that can create a huge wave of innovation and Employment Opportunities for young people i have to say i really like that idea but youre talking about never ridging privacy for data to be used you know in a bigger context right or perhaps even curing cancer but sylvia i have to ask are we prepared for this i mean ive heard it said that if the challenge for small data with privacy then the challenge for big data is safeguarding our free real that the Predictive Technology will be so good that i wont even know if my thoughts a mind. I dont think we yet rady for that we havent gotten to that level yet the deep countries that are ready to embrace that but. The general feeling of the eightys you