THE AFRICA 21ST CENTURY CLOCK
Background:
Africa trails the rest of the world in most development indicators. In 2000, this fact was reflected in a report titled, “Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?” According to this report by the World Bank, at the turn of the 20th century, Africa had gloomy social, economic and political conditions. 200 of every 1,000 children died before age 5; foreign aid constituted almost half of public spending; and at least one African in five lived in a country severely disrupted by war.
Solution:
In 2021, in response to the lingering challenges of the continent, Remake Africa was founded. As we approach 2025, we are confronted with a sense of urgency amid a quarterly milestone in Africa’s 21st-century prospects, analogous to 6am if the entire century were fitted into a 24-hour clock. We are jolted by the fact that the “6am of the 21st century” corresponds to a stage in the circadian rhythm or biological clock characterised by a transition from sleepiness to wakefulness with the body set to arise. More than a decade since the “Africa Rising” phenomenon, we seek to awaken Africa through the Africa 21st-Century Clock.
Project Description:
The project comprises three core components corresponding to three parts of a digital clock, the Regulator, the Timekeeper and the Alarm. The Regulator is the dynamic vision of a 21st-century Africa, progressively, iteratively and collaboratively designed by the African people as a blueprint of the Africa we want to see and the benchmark against which progress will be measured in quarterly milestones: 2050, 2075 and 2100. The Timekeeper will aggregate data on the current scorecard benchmarked against the vision along social, economic and political indicators. The Alarm Segment will build awareness, mobilize participation, and stir a sense of urgency through advocacy and capacity-building.
At any point in the century, against the benchmark of the progressive vision, the clock will tell what time it is for Africa, whether the continent is in time, ahead of time or behind time and what governments, businesses and civil society can do to bridge gaps.
Project USP:
While there are existing global and continental blueprints propelling Africa’s development and providing context for monitoring and evaluating progress in the 21st century including the MDGs (2000-2015) and its successor blueprint, the SDGs (2015-2030) as well as the continental blueprint, Agenda 2063 (2013-2063), the Africa 21st Century Clock creates a strategic path along the course of the entire century. It will be a 100-year framework for African development with a backdated Year 2001 baseline and a Year 2100 end line and will provide automated access to the state of the continent at any point in the 100 years of the century.
Furthermore, whereas the existing developmental frameworks are top-bottom, created by policy-makers, thought leaders, development experts and political leaders, the Africa 21st Century Clock will be bottom-up. The social, economic and political indicators will be benchmarked against a vision of Africa created by the African people. Although it will feed off the existing frameworks such as the SDGs and Agenda ’63 in providing an envisioning frame, it will ultimately be based on a vision of Africa created by the people. This is because the Balance Wheel component of the project will be an inclusive, iterative, man-machine collaborative vision of Africa by the year 2100 leveraging open-source tools and attracting Africans from all over the continent and the diaspora. This collective input from diverse sources will be automatedly sorted, weighted and incorporated into the blueprint throughout the century.
To include a vast majority of Africans who do not have access to high-tech open-source tools, low-hanging and readily accessible platforms such as social media as well as low-tech communication platforms such as Short Messaging Service (SMS) will also be deployed to crowdsource input towards the Balance Wheel component of the project (a vision of the 21st-century Africa).
Furthermore, in line with the injunction to write the vision and make it plain that he/she who reads it can run with it, the infographic interphase will make the portal easily accessible and interpretable even as the clock model will send a message of the urgency of now.
Collaboration Opportunities:
To develop and deploy the Africa 21st Century Clock, in addition to the needed project financing, multidimensional collaborations are required for the technology components (including data scientists and analysts as well as AI solutions architects and developers), for data-driven development scorecard and policy analysis (including national and multilateral development institutions), and for mobilisation (including new and conventional media).