Empowering Africa's future: Leveraging local data for business and STEM innovation

With a burgeoning startup ecosystem in Africa, founders and executives of young companies are faced with making numerous daily business decisions to create value for customers, partners, and investors.

They ask questions like: What will be the right entry strategy for our product/service? What is customers’ willingness to pay? What is the persona of our ideal customers and what channels will be right to reach them? Mature companies have an even more arduous task.

With consumer preferences changing at the speed of light and technological advancement altering how customers interact with products and services, leaders must act fast while facing significant uncertainty in the marketplace.

Zerone’s solution helps to remove “guesswork” from the decision-making process. Anyone who makes important decisions knows that having the relevant data helps in making the right calls.

Speak less of the importance of data in STEM education - data science, data/business analytics, machine learning, and AI. Models are trained on data, and yes, not just any data - if ML and AI models are going to be built for Africans, they cannot be trained with data sourced from a different part of the world.

As a continent, we talk a big game on our commitment to STEM education, but if our students learn business analytics (for example) by analyzing customer purchase history from a bike shop in Australia because that dataset is readily available on Kaggle, what exactly do we achieve? Well, our students may learn how to run regression and figure out who the repeat customers are or what bike model is the most popular among customers, but knowing these sparks no innovation in Africa.

Let me show you what will! If the dataset was on consumers' responses from consuming beverages on the Ghanaian market, the student would learn all the above, just like in the Australian bike dataset, but more!

They will see trends in growing customer preferences, and they will observe gaps in the Ghanaian beverage industry, and some will be bold to start companies to address those gaps. Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Employment, and Value Creation – all because students learned data analytics with the right dataset.

Zerone Analytiqs has just launched its data gathering tool, ZeroneData, that will serve so many startups, organizations, and corporations as they innovate, grow, and listen to the voice of their customer. Next, we are busily at work to launch our AI-powered analytics platform engineered and warehoused with data sourced from Africa. This will bring the continent’s STEM education commitments to life!