The African Diaspora As a Force for Social and Economic Transformation

Africa is entering into a phase of unprecedented challenges, and unprecedented opportunity. The demographic landscape of the continent is rapidly shifting as climate change, population growth, and urbanization accelerate. At the same time, Africa's middle class is growing, the technology ecosystem is thriving, and historic efforts to unify the continent are underway. Realizing Africa's human potential will require major feats of engineering on many fronts. Overhauls and expansion are needed in diverse areas, including agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare, education, urban planning, industry, commerce, finance and government. Improvements in all of these sectors are vital to Africa's prosperity and vitality, and innovative use of technology is the key to reaching this endeavor. Beyond improving quality of life, progress in these strategic areas holds the potential to launch Africa to a position of global leadership in tackling the challenges of the 21st century.The realization of this vision is hindered, however, by a severe shortage of intellectual capital and engineering expertise across the continent. Many engineers have left Africa to work abroad and now support the African economy in the form of remittances, but money alone cannot buy the knowledge and experience needed to empower Africans to develop and maintain locally appropriate engineering solutions.With improvements in communication technology, there is an emerging opportunity to transfer intellectual capital . An organized community of skilled professionals from the diaspora can focus applied engineering knowledge on targeted projects, supporting agents of change in Africa with the technical expertise necessary to maximize their chances of success. This book begins with an introduction to Engineer Africa's methodology for capitalizing on this opportunity. We describe an organizational pipeline which enables experts from the diaspora to effectively and efficiently support projects and startups in Africa. The main body of the text then goes on to describe examples of how this resource can be applied to high impact initiatives in a number of key sectors. Each section is dedicated to one sector which is identified as an area whose development could catalyze Africa's structural transformation into a stronger, more independent, and more unified community.

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