We have observed groups of people ignoring critical health guidance, in part because they doubted the veracity of available information or because they relied on disinformation. At the same time, a number of businesses have stepped up to the plate with responsible actions and information from credible sources, including scientists and public health authorities, knowing that their employees expect frequent updates and agile changes to workplace policies.

Edelman provided insight into the need for business and employers to step up during this difficult and uncertain time with two special research reports that were released recently, allowing us to glean further pertinent insights on the critical role that employers and brands are expected to play during the coronavirus pandemic.

Findings from our survey, conducted across 12-markets globally, revealed the power and necessity of brands as well as their urgent need to act. Brands should find solutions instead of just selling and the solutions need to be tangible and fast, not impressionistic and conceptual.

Show up and do your part

In times of crisis, people want credible information, and this is where brands have a vital role to play. Now is not the time to disappear, but to show up and use all your resources and creativity to make a difference. This is about understanding the unique role your brand plays in people’s lives, how this has changed, and how your brand can help or be useful during a crisis.

Respondents recognised the need for specific brand action to help address the societal challenges posed by Covid-19, from protecting the well-being of employees to shifting products and pricing to creating a sense of community. 62% of respondents said their country will not make it through this crisis without brands playing a critical role in addressing the challenges of the pandemic. 55% said that brands and companies are responding more quickly and effectively than government.

Image above: Karena Crerar, Edelman Africa Advisory Practice Lead

At the same time, 71% agree that if they perceive that a brand is putting profit over people, they will lose trust in that brand forever.Brands need to look for opportunities to lead by example and do the right thing, where it makes sense for their business. If there is useful and reliable information that might help people navigate the uncertainty, or keep people calm, brands need to share it. If you have important information that affects your company, or your employees (e.g. around transmission of the virus), you may want to consider sharing that publicly.

Don’t act alone

There is strength in collaboration. To truly help people during this pandemic requires joining forces with others – most critically government. There was unanimity across markets (90% globally) that people wanted brands to do everything they could to protect the well-being and financial security of their employees and suppliers, even if it means substantial financial losses until the pandemic ends.

Key roles included being a regular reliable news source that keeps people informed, educating through offering people instructional information about how to protect themselves and bringing people together through powerful platforms such as social media by connecting and helping them stay emotionally close.

There is a clear desire that brands partner with government and also be a safety net stepping in to fill gaps in the government’s response to the virus.

Solve, don’t sell

Brands should focus all efforts on finding appropriate and meaningful solutions to the problems people are facing today. The communication efforts should be geared towards keeping the public fully informed with regards to how the brand is supporting and protecting its employees and customers and what operational changes have been made to ensure there is access to its products and services.

In our survey, we learned 72% of respondents agreed it is comforting and reassuring to hear what the brands they use are doing to respond to the pandemic. For respondents, this indicated that the brand was responsible, caring and sensitive enough to be in touch with the needs of the market.

In this time of crisis, people are turning more and more to the brands that they are absolutely sure that they can trust, brands that are innovative and genuinely compassionate in the way they respond to issues like the virus outbreak. People are interested in brands and companies that place people before their profits and there is no better time to do this than right now. Brands need to be present and play an active role in the solution.

Edelman is supporting businesses and organisations looking to better understand the COVID-19 pandemic and its public health implications, manage communications with employees and customers, as well as provide guidance on strategies and policies for effective preparedness and response efforts.

Download the full reports below:

• Brand Trust and the Corona virus pandemic
• Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and the Coronavirus

Issued by:

Edelman South Africa – For more information or media requests, please contact:

Thando Ntsinde –  079 166 7576/ [email protected]

About Edelman Africa

Edelman Africa is a leading Pan-African communications consultancy that partners with businesses and organisations to evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations. Edelman works with a diversified clientele across sectors including telecommunications, energy, technology, financial services, professional services and fast-moving consumer goods. With more than 25 years of experience on the continent, Edelman has supported local organisations and multi-nationals with communications strategy and execution, delivering results in more than 30 countries across Africa. Edelman Africa’s offices, in Johannesburg and Nairobi, comprise former journalists, client strategists, communication specialists, design and editorial experts, that are committed to delivering the best results for their clients.

As per the latest report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Africa is experiencing the fastest progression of urbanisation the world over, thereby proving a prominent force in influencing global energy trends within the next 20 years. In addition, the continent’s overall population is projected to expand by 600 million before 2040, accounting for half of the global increase over that period.

These profound shifts will drive the continent’s economic growth, infrastructure development and, consequently, energy demand, which is predicted to rise by 60%. Africa Energy Outlook 2019 report states that cumulative investments of $2.6 trillion are required between 2019 and 2040 to meet this rising energy demand and provide more accessible energy facilities to African citizens.

While this energy gap remains a major barrier to Africa’s sustained economic development, it inversely presents opportunities for many African nations such as current advancements in the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) market; potential for realising onshore value; while simultaneously driving innovation in the raising of extensive financing for African projects, to name a few.

IEA findings conclude that with appropriately funded, developed and executed policies, Africa not only has potential to close the energy gap by providing millions of African people with access to electricity by 2030, but it could become the first continent to boost its economy largely through the use of modern, low-carbon energy sources. If governments underscore the need for clean energy technologies, solar PV could become Africa’s principal electricity source with reference to installed capacity by 2040.

In addition, Africa’s abundant supplies of natural gas enable the continent to increase industrial operations along with flexible electricity supply that complements renewables. Owing to these vast natural resources, Africa has an exceptional opportunity to pursue a considerably lower carbon strategy in comparison to its global counterparts, subsequently leapfrogging the fossil fuel sector and affording its people with clean, reliable and accessible energy, further reducing the energy gap and ultimately raising the standard of living of its residents.

Moreover, having substantial reserves of minerals, such as platinum and cobalt, required in rapidly expanding and critical clean energy technologies, Africa represents a pivotal player in the current and future global energy realm.

In particular, the Democratic Republic of the Congo constitutes two-thirds of the world’s cobalt production, a crucial element in batteries, while South Africa produces 70% of global platinum, used in hydrogen fuel cells. As energy transitions gain momentum, so will demand for those minerals, placing Africa in a very influential market position.

Although current governmental budgets and development funding may be inadequate to finance investments required to address the continent’s rising power demands, mobilising private capital is considered a realistic alternative to implement the development of energy access.

The Africa Energy Indaba 2020 is the summit to attend amidst all the exciting and revolutionary developments in the space that is energy. Next year’s Indaba is set to focus on exploring the business opportunity to address the significant energy gap. The event will further empower African energy participants to enter a new age of innovation, technology, competitiveness and sustainability. The conference will provide a multitude of business opportunities for anyone invested and seeking to invest in the energy sector.

However, substantial scientific evidence is indicating that bacteria can be used to treat and prevent many illnesses. Therefore, millions of people all over the world are taking capsules of probiotics on a daily basis with the goal of improving their digestion and health. Probiotics are live bacteria and yeasts that are often recommended for gastrointestinal problems, for treating, amongst others, the development of allergies and eczema in children, treating and preventing vaginal and urinary tract infections in women, and delaying the recurrence of bladder cancer.

Probiotics are particularly helpful to maintain gut health and are often recommended to assist with digestive problems such as infectious diarrhoea, lactose intolerance, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, H. pylori (the cause of ulcers), digestive tract infection caused by Clostridium difficile (a bacteria causing diarrhoea), and pouchitis (a possible side effect of colon removal surgery).

Would it not be wonderful if the bacteria in your daily probiotic could timeously detect diseases in your intestines and inform you when something is wrong? Well, this wish may soon come true. In a recent paper published in the academic journal mSystems, researchers from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Harvard Medical School described how they created an effective, non-invasive way to quickly identify new bacterial biosensors that can recognize and report the presence of various triggers in the gut indicating the onset of disease. This significant discovery sets the stage for a new frontier of digestive health monitoring and treatment.

Currently the understanding of how the human gut microbiome behaves is still in its early stages. The gut microbiome entails the collective genome of microbes inhabiting the gut including bacteria, archaea (single-celled organisms), protists (diverse eukaryotic, predominantly unicellular microscopic organisms), viruses, and fungi.

The lack of understanding has hindered research in the use of bacteria as biosensors. However, the research of the Harvard University team have succeeded to identify genetic elements in bacteria that respond to different signals in the gut, which allow them to detect and even treat diseases over a period of time.

The research builds on work previously done by the Wyss Institute that created a genetic circuit consisting of a “memory element” derived from a virus and a synthetic “trigger element.” Together these two can detect and record the presence of a specific stimulus. In the original experiment the researchers used a deactivated version of the antibiotic tetracycline as stimulus.

The genetic circuit was integrated into the genomes of Escherichia coli (better known as E. coli) bacteria, which were introduced into mice. The mice were then given the antibiotic tetracycline, which immediately caused the trigger element in the bacterial circuit to activate the memory element. It literally flipped like a switch and remained “on” for up to a week so that the bacteria “remembered” the presence of the tetracycline. The “on” signal was then easily read by analyzing the animals’ excrement, which is a totally non-invasive procedure.

Following the success of the experiment, the research team next demonstrated that the circuit could be modified to detect and report a naturally occurring molecule (tetrathionate) that indicates the presence of inflammation in the intestine of mice for up to six months after introduction into the animals. The experiment thus confirmed that the constructed diagnostic and therapeutic circuits could be used to monitor signals that would be useful in the diagnosis and treatment of disease in the gut over a longer period of time, such as inflammation and intestinal bleeding.

However, the researchers have in their bacteria-based diagnostic method identified only one molecule and condition. They thus started to test several potential trigger elements that could be indications of diseases in the intestines of mice by using a library of different strains of E. coli.

The researchers repeated the experiment numerous times to determine if any of the trigger elements were activated by substances in the mice’s intestines and could serve as sensors of gut-specific signals. Eventually they succeeded in successfully recording the presence of inflammatory biomolecules in the mouse gut that could thus serve as a living monitor of gastrointestinal health. Based on the triggering effect of the E. coli bacteria, the researchers were able to clearly distinguish between mice with intestinal inflammation and those mice that had a healthy gut.

The bacterial genome is much simpler than the human or animal genome, and is generally composed of only a single, circular chromosome. However, there is still much we do not know about the function and regulation of bacterial genomes. This is why the method of the Harvard researchers is such a breakthrough, since it allows for the use of biosensors that already exists in nature instead of the almost impossible task of designing it.

The scientists of the Wyss Institute under the leadership of Dr Alexander Naydich took advantage of the amazing genetic diversity of the microbiome to develop a solution for the detection of diseases in the intestines through the use of bacteria such as E. coli.

The system were further refined to include the ability to record signals that occur either chronically or momentarily in the gut, as well as adjustable sensitivity that allowed for the fine-tuning of bacterial biosensors to detect specific conditions within the gut over an extended period of time. The team of researchers was thus able to improve the technology from a tool that tests for one condition or disease to a tool that can test for multiple diseases in the gut concurrently.

The tool is thus not only useful for the identification of new potential biosensors and diseases, but could in the future be developed into a probiotic-like capsule containing complex collections of bacteria that sense and record several signals simultaneously, allowing clinicians to “fingerprint” a disease and thus have a much greater confidence in making a diagnosis.

The constant progress made by the team of the well-known Harvard University Silver Lab with regard to the development of living cellular devices based on the genetic reengineering of the microbiome, represents an entirely new approach to affordable low-cost diagnostics and therapeutics in the medical world.

Since the gut is a largely obscure and inaccessible environment, the use of live, engineered probiotics to detect and respond to disease signals in a living person represents a new frontier in the management of gut diseases.

This approach of the Harvard researchers of introducing engineering circuits into intestinal bacteria to sense, record and respond to signals could in future be a valuable tool for medical professionals in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of gastrointestinal and other diseases. In recent times a range of studies have engineered bacteria to serve as potential treatments for inflammation, metabolic disease, cancer, and infection. This approach is not only cost-effective, but also non-invasive, since invasive sampling through an expensive colonoscopy and biopsy is not necessary.

Engineered probiotics also show promise as a novel mechanism for drug delivery. It has the potential to radically transform how we interact with and control biological systems, including our own bodies.

It seems that it is quite possible that the doctor would in future be able to say: “Take two E. coli capsules immediately and call me in the morning if you do not feel better.”

Professor Louis C H Fourie is a futurist and technology strategist. [email protected]

BUSINESS REPORT

“The world has essentially become one marketplace, and one workforce,” says Jacobus de Nysschen, executive director at Creative CFO, a financial services firm based in Cape Town that is focused on the SME sector. “To build a successful company today, you have to gain access to the global innovation marketplace, which means embracing the right technology.”

According to de Nysschen, the rapidly changing nature of the modern work environment is requiring business owners and entrepreneurs to rethink their traditional structures – and to look towards a more global and collaborative way of working.

“To survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment, one requires an equally dynamic organisational structure in order to properly address the new challenges and opportunities,” he says.

Cloud-enabled collaboration

While it may sound contradictory, de Nysschen argues that technology should be used to build relationships “to work together on a human level”. In his view, success for SMEs is reliant upon building world-class teams, and harnessing technology to collaborate with top professionals – no matter where they may be located.

To drive collaboration, in real time, he asserts that SMEs must harness cloud computing in the form of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) (see sidebar).

“With cloud computing, SMEs are able to leverage best-of-breed technology, using an accessible, subscription-based model,” adds de Nysschen. “This allows them to compete with businesses that have huge balance sheets and access to capital.”

Transforming the finance department

A clear example of how the cloud is empowering SMEs can be found in the growing role of cloud-based accounting software. New, virtual accounting platforms are enabling business owners to collaborate and work with accountants ‘in the cloud’ by accessing the same set of accounting records – in real time – and sharing information more freely with each other.

This means that instead of capturing data manually, the cloud offers integrated solutions whereby, for example, bank transactions feed directly into the system – removing errors and saving time. Naturally, this frees up accountants and financial managers to provide more analysis and advisory around growth opportunities for SMEs.

Colin Timmis, country manager at Xero South Africa, which provides online, cloud-based accounting software, also points out that cloud-based accounting is creating new opportunities for SMEs through data. This is because digital platforms, whereby data is stored on one, common server, make it easier to integrate accounting with other functions – and with other key SME role players.

“At Xero, for example, we’ve announced new agreements with three South African digital lenders: Bridgement, Retail Capital, and Lulalend,” notes Timmis in Xero’s 2019 State of South African Small Business report. “Initiatives like these will improve businesses’ access to funding – and make the accounting function more versatile and multidimensional.”

Change on the horizon

The 2019 Xero report, conducted in partnership with IT consultancy World Wide Worx, found that only 22% of local SMEs are using cloud accounting tools – with 23% of all respondents still doing their books manually.

This should begin to change soon, however, as overall tech savvy increases and the technology itself becomes more accessible. Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx, says that SMEs will probably leapfrog from basic, paper-based accounting to cloud platforms in the next 24 months – largely because of new data centres coming online in South Africa.

Earlier this year, Microsoft launched enterprise-grade data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Additionally, Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it will open an infrastructure region in SA in the first half of 2020. According to experts, the new data centres will provide African businesses with far greater availability to cloud services, at a lower cost.

“Previous to the South African data centres coming online, local businesses were forced to connect to data centres in Europe and North America – which put them at a disadvantage to global competitors with decreased latency and higher costs,” says Goldstuck of World Wide Worx.

Training is key

Although the increasing availability of cloud platforms (coupled with better connectivity in the form of fibre and impending 5G rollouts) will certainly give SMEs a boost, it ultimately falls on business owners to drive technology adoption.

Xero’s Timmis explains that a major barrier to technological adoption today is training.

“While this wasn’t reflected in our survey, it’s fair to say that most employees are not hired for their cloud computing skills,” he says.

The 2019 survey found that 67% of businesses don’t intend to allocate budget for training employees around ‘using their essential technologies’.

“There’s an argument that these tools should be intuitive or self explanatory, but it’s not unreasonable to expect that a new invoicing software or CRM system will have a learning curve – however deep or shallow,” notes Timmis.

“Putting processes in place for training employees can be costly in the short term but will pay dividends in the long term as teams upskill themselves with little supervision or additional expense. The financial impact of training an existing team is usually lower than the price of interviewing, hiring and on-boarding new staff.”

Moreover, the Xero report warns that when employees are expected to self-teach and figure it out as they go, they run the risk of “learning to work around the technology rather than with it”.

Timmis points to platforms such as live and online courses, webinars, and events to train employees and to help them become more comfortable using cloud-based tools.

A critical shift

According to several studies and research papers, SMEs in South Africa provide about 61% of the country’s employment.

While many fear that new technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence will threaten local jobs, it is more likely that the strategic adoption of cloud computing and other digital platforms will in fact create jobs through enabling sustainable business growth.

As the 2019 Xero/World Wide Worx report aptly concludes: “If small businesses seize the opportunity, they won’t just transform their fortunes, they’ll transform those of the entire country.”

This article originally appeared in the 29 August edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here or subscribe to our newsletter here.

Source:

During the Bronze Age (≈3300-1200 BC) it was the production of the harder and more durable bronze through the smelting of copper and adding of tin or arsenic that gave civilisations a technological advantage.

In the Iron Age (≈1200-600 BC) iron and steel were introduced and people started to make tools and weapons superior to their bronze equivalents. Iron tools made farming much easier and superior iron weaponry also allowed the Persians to establish the first Persian Empire, which became one of the largest empires in history, extending from the Balkans of Eastern Europe to the Indus Valley in India.

With the rise of the European and American steel industry railroad tracks were spreading and enhanced transport and trade. Silicon semiconductors enabled the building of computers, which is one of the greatest technological innovations since the Gutenberg printing press of 1450.

All the above technologies moulded the development of society, and contributed to their economic power and global domination.

Change the future

Now, a new material has the potential to change the future as in the case of history past. This material is graphene and was briefly mentioned in Tech News last Friday when its use in smart contact lenses was described.

Graphene is widely called a “super material” and its remarkable characteristics could have far-reaching implications for the future of physics, engineering, bioengineering and civilisation as a whole. Graphene is stronger than steel, thinner than paper and could very much be the technology that changes the course of history in the 21st century.

Graphene is considered one of the disruptive technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and could lead to numerous innovations that open up new markets and replace existing technologies or materials. It is purported to transform everything from computing and car tyres to solar cells and smoke detectors. When graphene is used both to improve an existing material and in a transformational capacity its true potential is realised.

But what precisely is this promising graphene? Graphene is a monolayer or single, thin layer of graphite (the soft, flaky material that is used in the lead of a pencil) in the form of a two-dimensional, atomic-scale, hexagonal lattice (with a honeycomb-like appearance) in which one atom forms each vertex. Interestingly, every pencil mark contains a tiny speck of graphene, but since they are only one atom high, we cannot see them.

Graphite is an allotrope of carbon and thus possesses the same atoms as carbon, but they are arranged in a different way, assigning different properties to the material. Graphite consists of bonded layers of atoms that are very weakly held together by Van Der Waals forces (weak, short-range electrostatic attractive forces between uncharged molecules).

Radically different characteristics

Diamonds and graphite are both made of identical carbon atoms, but their characteristics are radically different since the atoms are arranged in completely different ways. In diamonds the atoms are tightly bonded in three-dimensional tetrahedrons (or triangular pyramids), whereas in graphite, atoms are bonded tightly in two-dimensional layers held together by weak forces. It is this arrangement of atoms that give the two materials their different properties: graphite is black, dull and relatively soft, while diamonds are transparent and one of the hardest natural materials.

In the last few years scientists have discovered several other allotropes of carbon with very interesting properties. Fullerenes or hollow cages of atoms, for instance, were discovered in 1985, including the so-called Buckyball. Others are nanotubes (flat sheets of carbon atoms curled into exceptionally thin, hollow tubes of one nanometre in diameter) and graphene.

What makes graphene unique is that when it is isolated from graphite it is a mere one-atom thick with a molecular bond length of 0.142 nanometres. A stack of about 3 million layers is needed to make graphene of 1mm thick. Graphene is the first two-dimensional material ever discovered and is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair. Although graphene is the thinnest material known to man (1 square meter only weighs around 0.77 milligrams), it is between 100-300 times stronger than steel and one of the strongest materials in the known universe – yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. The structural and physical characteristics of graphene make the potential applications in a variety of technological fields very promising.

Interesting is that graphite has been used by humans since the Neolithic era. However, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester only discovered graphene by accident in 2004 through the use of scotch tape!

Thin flakes on tape

While polishing a large block of graphite with scotch tape, the researchers discovered extremely thin flakes on the tape held together by van der Waals forces. After peeling super-thin layers of one atom each from the graphite flakes, they found graphene. However, the scientific world was very sceptical and their paper has been rejected twice by the prestigious journal, Nature. It was only much later that Geim and Novoselov’s paper was published. In 2010 the Nobel Prize for Physics were awarded to them for their discovery of this remarkable and exciting material.

But graphene has many more distinctive characteristics than its thinness and strength. It is thermally (the best conductor of heat at room temperature) and electrically conductive, while still transparent. It is magnetic, has a uniform absorption of light across the visible and near-infrared parts of the spectrum, and apparently impermeable to most liquids and gases.

Since carbon is the chemical basis for all known life on earth (2nd most abundant mass within the human body and the 4th most abundant element in the universe), graphene is an eco-friendly, sustainable solution for an almost infinite number of applications.

It is this incredible breadth of properties that allows graphene to play a significant role in a vast number of products, processes and industries. No other material has the same breadth of properties that graphene boasts, making it ideal for countless applications. This has made graphene the object of research by numerous scientists in fields varying from consumer technology to environmental science. Particularly in transport, medicine, electronics, energy, defence, and desalination, to name a few, graphene research is making a substantial impact. It seems as if the potential of graphene is limited only by our imagination.

A wonderful material

But if graphene is such a wonderful material, why do we not find it everywhere? As is often the case with new materials, graphene is still extremely expensive to produce in large quantities, limiting at the moment its use in any product that would demand mass production.

But graphene research is by no means slowing down. Researchers the world over — including the University of Manchester, where graphene was first discovered — are continually filing patents for new methods of creating and using graphene.  The European Union invested heavily in research into the use of graphene in electronics, as well as many major tech companies in Asia such as Samsung.

Graphene could easily become a battlefield in international power play in the coming years. Empires during history often rose and fell based on their control of resources such as bronze, iron and steel.

Revolutions do not happen overnight. Silicon was discovered in the mid-19th century, but it took nearly a century before silicon semiconductors paved the way for the rise of computers. Perhaps graphene, with its almost mythical qualities, will become the resource that drives the next era of human history.

Professor Louis C H Fourie is a futurist and technology strategist.  [email protected]

BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE

In SA, the government has identified agricultural value chains as one of the sectors that can stimulate youth employment.

The OBG report, which analyses the state of the sector and its medium-term development prospects, highlights Africa’s significant untapped agricultural potential. While the continent accounts for 60% of the world’s arable land, it only contributes 4% of total output, and this could further decrease should governments fail to lure young people to the sector.

The OBG report cites the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which states that the average age of African farmers is 60. In many cases farmers across the continent are struggling to convince their children to take over when they retire. Low incomes and the inherent difficulties of farming are pushing many young people to move to urban centres to find jobs. However, unemployment is still prevalent among Africa’s youth.

The African Development Bank estimates that only about 3.1-million new jobs are created each year — equivalent to about a quarter of the 12-million young people entering the workforce annually in Africa. The continent has the youngest population in the world, with an estimated 60% of people under the age of 25. Unemployment and underpaid jobs are driving millions of youth into poverty each year, pushing some to take significant risks to migrate to Europe.

“In this context agriculture is increasingly seen as key to providing jobs for Africa’s youth and to convincing them to stay in their countries, and the rural areas in particular,” the OBG report states.

It encourages governments to turn to new technology to attract youth to the sector.

New technology

“Innovations can play a major role in that objective. ICT is increasingly being used in Africa’s agriculture sector, often through smart or precision farming. New technology could be an effective way to lure young people towards the sector.” Furthermore, the adoption of technology is set to play a significant role in mitigating the effects of climate change.

“Through precision farming, mobile apps and drones, governments and others in agriculture hope the sector will increase profitability, sustainability and attractiveness as a profession in the years to come.”

The FAO and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said in their Agricultural Outlook 2018/2027 that a coherent and integrated approach that focuses on addressing the existing obstacles related to “education, land access and tenure, access to financial services, access to markets, access to green jobs and involvement in policy dialogue has the potential to make the agriculture sector more attractive to young people, providing the additional push that may be needed for them to enter the sector.”

The OBG report also states that Africa has yet to fully realise its agricultural potential, partly as a result of years of underinvestment.

However, agriculture remains one of Africa’s most important economic sectors, accounting for more than 15% of the region’s GDP and providing employment to more than two-thirds of the population.

“If the sector’s most notable challenges can be overcome, agriculture could play an even larger part in transforming economies,” the authors of the OBG report said.

[email protected]

SOURCE: Businesslive