HUAWEI: Digital economy grants Kenya more opportunities

The digital economy is predicted to be worth $23 trillion by 2025, and there are tremendous opportunities in Kenya for businesses-both small and big-to grab a piece of this said Adam Lane, Senior Director, Huawei Technologies during The Year Ahead Forum 2020 organized by CIO East Africa in Nairobi.

According to Lane, with many new solutions available on the cloud that are both accessible and affordable there is immense hope for enterprises to thrive in 2020 and beyond.

While speaking during CIO East Africa’s The Year Ahead Forum themed: Turning Accelerated Disruption into Opportunities, Lane observed that the era of cloud-native applications, driven by data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and soon to be launched 5G platforms are lined to accelerate digitization in the country.

“Huawei’s unrivalled global and local presence, expertise across the entire ICT value chain, and commitment to quality and customer service, emerges as a unique one and well placed to help businesses and public entities managed by governments to catalyze growth and service delivery,”

Adam Lane, Senior Director, Huawei Technologies.

“Existing IT systems at medium-to-large sized enterprises are moving towards hybrid cloud architectures. Internet applications and other new technologies like cloud computing, AI, and loT are all growing at rapid pace,” added Lane.

With Huawei habouring elaborate plans for a fully connected Africa driven by data and AI applications is investing in cloud to build a fully connected and intelligent African continent; where Kenya has steadily emerged as an African rising-star Silicon Savannah owing to its early and fast-start adoption of its revolutionary digital payments, which has proven to be a driver for economic growth and for poverty reduction.

Data recently deduced by Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) demonstrates that by Kenyans moving Ksh 4.35 trillion through their mobile phones in 2019, the country’s digital marketplace had exponentially grown, yielded confidence as it evolved from a simple means of sending and receiving money as it became a mechanism of transactional services empowering the citizens to embrace digital services.

While appreciating the leaps Kenya has continued to harness at a time that mobile money platforms transitioned from money transfer channels to financial services platforms, Lane said businesses should look around globally, be fast learners as well as innovators and seize opportunities that develop new partnerships with suppliers and peers across the ecosystem to take advantage of these trends.

Huawei said Lane is actively working with many Kenyan government agencies and businesses from diverse sectors to help them think differently, develop new solutions and new business models, and thus find new areas for growth.

“The company’s unrivalled global and local presence, expertise across the entire ICT value chain, and commitment to quality and customer service, emerges as a unique one and well placed to help businesses and public entities managed by governments to catalyze growth and service delivery,” Lane asserted.