A South African consortium has been selected to host the southern African lab of the African Regional Mobile Application Laboratory, a platform for building technical and business skills for mobile applications.
The consortium is made up of the Meraka Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Innovation Hub, Innovation Lab, and Ungana-Afrika.
The iHub consortium, comprising Nairobi's iHub, eMobilis, the World Wide Web Foundation and the University of Nairobi School of Computing and Informatics, was named as the winning host of the East Africa lab.
Announcing the winners at the AITEC East African ICT Summit last week, Dr Tim Kelly, an ICT policy specialist at the World Bank's infoDev programme, said the two successful bidders were selected from 39 original applicants, nine of which were short listed.
“The enthusiastic response to infoDev's call for proposals is especially exciting as it has already created partnerships between applicants and also points out several avenues and organisations for future collaboration,” he added.
"Mobile applications hold great promise for Africa's development, both on the user side and on the supply side,” said Kelly. He pointed to applications such as M-Pesa in Kenya and the Shuttleworth Foundation's m-novels initiative to promote literacy in SA as examples of the potentially transformational effect they can have on the user side.
“On the supply side, Africa's developers are well-positioned to break into this emerging market, which is characterised by high growth and low barriers to entry", said Kelly.
He also revealed that the establishment of these labs is evidence of the increasing power of mobile applications to support socio-economic development.
The two mobile application labs will be focal points run and used by Africans working to increase the competitiveness of innovative enterprises working in mobile content and applications, Kelly said.
According to a statement, the labs will provide hi-tech equipment, technical training and workshops, and connect developers and entrepreneurs with potential investors, academic experts, and public sector leaders.
The CSIR, Innovation Hub, Innovation Lab and Ungana-Afrika consortium has strong existing relationships in business, the public sector, civil society and academia.
Laurens Cloete, acting executive director of the CSIR Meraka Institute, says: “The Meraka consortium is a great platform for the m-apps lab, with key players in the southern African ecosystem providing complementary expertise.
“As an established ICT research, development and innovation institute, Meraka will combine its expertise and experience with the world-class facilities and incubation experience of the Innovation Hub. This is further enhanced by the contributions from Ungana-Afrika and Innovation Lab.”
Cloete added that this marks an opportunity to continue strengthening its collaboration with industry, in line with the recent call from the Department of Science and Technology.
Immediate tasks include a detailed planning phase for the lab implementation, with the appointment of a lab manager as a priority.
The African Regional Mobile Application Laboratory is part of the government of Finland and Nokia initiative - 'Creating sustainable businesses in the knowledge economy' programme.
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