{"id":37438,"date":"2018-05-07T20:51:25","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T20:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/kagame-challenges-africans-on-use-of-technology\/"},"modified":"2018-05-09T11:46:06","modified_gmt":"2018-05-09T11:46:06","slug":"kagame-challenges-africans-on-use-of-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/kagame-challenges-africans-on-use-of-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Kagame challenges Africans on use of technology towards addressing integration issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Head of State was speaking Monday at the opening of Transform Africa Economic Forum in advance of the Transform Africa Summit.<\/p>\n

He said that technological integration should be seen as the vanguard of economic integration more generally.<\/p>\n

Kagame said that the purpose of integrating technology, it is to serve all people and their businesses among other things.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure in this audience there are people who have had close to a dozen stopovers, half of them maybe on our continent. Sometimes to fly home here you have to go to Europe maybe from one city to another in Europe, then to another city in Africa. So, when people are talking about one common digital market or one common air transport market, I think the purpose is to solve some of these problems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He said that when people are integrating technologies, they should bear in mind to also integrate regions, countries as well as the whole continent.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure people here know it very well, better than I how even when we are communicating the traffic follows the same route as the planes I was talking about. Doesn\u2019t it? Sometimes the traffic has to go through outside Africa and then back to us. What are you integrating, if you don\u2019t include this? Why don\u2019t we have that happening without having to pay for a visa for the traffic to first go out of Africa and then receive it back?\u201d Kagame challenged Africans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe visa is in the form of how much you pay. Is this something we can\u2019t address? We are supposedly very proud Africans, businesses and governments, I think we need to work hard on this,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n

Kagame said that Africa still has a long way to go noting that in recent years, regional cooperation on technology has produced good results to some extent.<\/p>\n

Kagame said that other urgent integration projects have languished on the African agenda, and added that through technology Africans can find ways of speeding them up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is beginning to change and with such a forum bringing so many people with diverse backgrounds together, I think we can make it happen faster. So, we see technology cooperation as part of that story. But behind it there has to be political will in real terms,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He said that Smart Africa\u2019s focus on One Africa Network has helped lay the groundwork for ambitious projects such as the African Continental Free Trade Area.<\/p>\n

Kagame pledged that they will continue to advance the digital transformation agenda championed by the African Union, Smart Africa, the Broadband Commission as well as the external partners.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n
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President Paul Kagame has said that sometimes Africa\u2019s traffic have to go through outside the continent and then connect to other African countries, things among others he challenged Africans to use technology and bring solutions to these problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[72],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-37438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-featured-news-home","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37438"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=37438"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=37438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}