African governments and the private sector have an opportunity to roll out services for digital access and use as a utility, which will extend information and communication technology (ICT), improve digital maturity and help to develop Africa and its cities to deal with urbanisation, says industrial technology multinational Siemens Southern Africa CEO Sabine Dall’Omo.

Africa’s rapid urbanisation presents an opportunity for the extension of ICT and improvement of digital maturity to help urban hubs, such as Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi and Addis Ababa, cope with the influx of inhabitants, she adds.

However, skills are a vital component of digital maturity. The challenge is whether government and industry are investing enough to develop these skills.

Larger and more developed economies tend to be more digitally mature, and analysis shows there are many indicators that can influence a country’s ability to capitalise on digitalisation, she says.

“If done correctly, it can drive entrepreneurial competition in a market,” she emphasises.

While the Ethiopian and Kenyan economies are similar in size and are growing at similar rates, Kenya is ahead in terms of digital maturity. This is attributed to it having more extensive ICT infrastructure and its more diverse and services-orientated economy, which typically drives the expansion of digital services, she explains.

Digitalisation means using new technologies like data analytics, the cloud and the Internet of Things to merge the virtual and real worlds.

This provides customers with substantial productivity increases across their entire value chains, from design and engineering to sales, production and services, which means faster time-to-market, greater flexibility and enhanced availability of products and systems for customers, explains Dall’Omo.

Further, the challenge in Africa extends to applying digitalisation in the context of various macroeconomic factors, such as regulation and infrastructure, she highlights.

Among the manufacturing, energy and transport industries in Africa, manufacturing is currently the most mature. The adoption level of smart technologies that can accelerate the next industrial revolution globally, termed Industry 4.0, remains at the foundation stage, but awareness of the significance and potential of this exponential technology is high.

In the energy sector, some of the main challenges in Africa are related to unreliable generation capacity, costly transmission, limited skilled workforces and underdeveloped customer and billing management systems.

“Digitalisation can assist in enabling decentralised power generation using alternative energy sources combined with intelligent grid management,” notes Dall’Omo.

In the transport sector, new ways of using existing infrastructure more efficiently are being enabled through digitalisation. The rail and road sectors need to focus on extending and integrating islands of excellence to address the mobility needs of citizens.

Digitalisation in Africa is poised to be introduced only in small isolated areas unless governments drive overarching policies to ensure consistency of standards, she concludes.