Do Home-grown Smart Devices Stand a Chance?

As Asian and Western countries make giant strides in mobile technology, there are a number of African techpreneurs who feel the continent has the potential to make its own original devices. Given the dominance of imported gadgets, the challenges for home-grown devices are real yet innovators still have hope.

Let us ponder this scenario: Apple is a big brand in America, while Samsung and Huawei are highly recognised in their respective continents. In Africa, we are yet to stand tall with devices engineered here for now. But one notable observation is that Africa is a main source of some rare precious minerals that are important in the manufacture of the devices.

The Democratic Republic of Congo alone supplies almost 70 per cent of the world’s tantalum metal which is an ingredient in all phones. The country has substantial reserves of columbite-tantalite or coltan, cassiterite, wolframite and gold. Coltan is the ore from which tantalum is extracted, while cassiterite produces tin.

Tantalum is a vital metal in the manufacture of compact and high performance capacitors found in electronic gadgets like mobile phones, laptops, tablets and gaming consoles.

Wolframite is the metal ore for tungsten used in vibration circuits of mobile phones.

Tin is a major ingredient in solder which is commonly used on electronic circuit boards. Gold is also present in some electronic products.

It is in the DRC that we find one of the up-coming techpreneur with ambitions of putting African home-grown devices on the tech-map. Verone Mankou, a Congolese entrepreneur has smartphones and tablets engineered in Congo. His tech-startup, VMK, boasts of a flagship tablet called Way-C and a smartphone called elikia.

VMK is derived from Vumbuka which is a word in Congo that captures the phrase ‘wake up’. Could it be a wake-up call for Africa to come up with home-grown mobile devices?

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