Kigali - Siyabonga Cwele, South African minister of telecommunications and postal services, told a session on Thursday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Africa meetings in the Rwandan capital that the challenges that Africa faced were a blessing for innovation.
Cwele was taking part in a panel discussion between African and global leaders from firms including IBM, General Electric and MasterCard, on the topic of Innovation as a New Driver of Growth in Africa.
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The panel was moderated by Dr Martyn Davies, managing director of Frontier Advisory Deloitte. Cwele agreed with fellow panelist Louis Otieno, director of corporate affairs for Africa and the Middle East for Microsoft's 4Afrika unit, who said: “In Africa we are blessed with a lot of challenges and a population that doesn't know otherwise, so what you have is people who solve problems.”
The difficulty, Otieno added, was in capturing those solutions.
AFRICAN NEWS AGENCY