20 min. talk
Sharing knowledge from African practitioners in various technical organisations, we’ll have a look at how they are doing things differently. Broadening our perspectives on what it means to have interoperability within complex systems.

Connected world
Africa

Connectivity in African countries can be pretty sophisticated, though quite different from the connection points in the West. The mobile banking economy, for example, eclipses that of North America, though a large percentage of customers don’t have bank accounts nor internet access. In the background, the systems that provide operability have been connected successfully, though the ways that everything comes together — infrastructure, user experience, information architecture, content — are unfamiliar.

Africa runs along a parallel track, developing its own solutions to problems and being innovative in its own way. Rather than getting caught in forehead-wrinkling moments while working out how the pieces fit together, this is an opportunity to learn from the mental models that have taken hold, from South Africa to Zambia to Kenya to Sudan.

This session brings knowledge gathered from African practitioners in telecommunications, banking, analytics, and other tech organisations who are doing things differently, or are perhaps “same but different”, to broaden our perspectives about what it means to have interoperability within complex systems.

Session slides

Sketch from Inge Nahuis, consultant at GriDD Effective Information