What changed
Kenya’s Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi has urged African countries to invest more heavily in research, technology and innovation, and to stop treating imported technology as the end goal. Speaking at the Africa Technology Leadership Conference in Nairobi on October 22, 2026, he called for stronger research institutions, industry partnerships and commercialisation of homegrown ideas.
Why it matters
The proposal is about where value is created. Countries that build the research, laboratories and businesses behind new technology can capture intellectual property, create quality jobs and shape the standards that govern emerging tools. Countries that do not may keep paying for other people’s expertise and solutions.
Mudavadi pointed to artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybersecurity and space systems as areas where technology is already influencing international competition and cooperation. He argued that African diplomacy should help secure research partnerships, technology transfer and access to global markets, while giving African countries a meaningful role in writing the rules.
His example was Kenya’s M-Pesa, launched in 2007 and built around mobile-phone transactions for people including those excluded from conventional banking. Its wider lesson is straightforward: an African innovation can travel when infrastructure and business models support it.
The harder part is turning the speech into sustained investment. Africa still trails other regions in research spending and researcher density, according to UNESCO data cited by Mudavadi. No funding commitment, timetable or participating-country agreement was reported, so the immediate test is whether governments, universities and businesses can convert the continental ambition into functioning institutions and competitive products.
Comments
No comments yet.