Innovative services focus of Africa-China friendship competition
Chinese and African participants at the the 2023 China-Africa Youth Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition's semi-final for the subgroup of digital economy and innovative services
Five teams will show off their creative ideas in promoting cooperation between China and Africa through the digital economy and innovative services at the 2023 China-Africa Youth Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition later this month in Wuhan, Hubei Province.
The competition, the second of its kind, is being organized by the Department of International Cooperation of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the China Science and Technology Exchange Center, and the Department of Science and Technology of Hubei Province.
This year, the event focuses on the theme of "science, technology and innovation contribute to the sustainable development of China-Africa partnership." In the preliminary and semi-final rounds, teams compete in three subgroups: digital economy and innovative services; circular economy and industrial manufacturing; and healthcare and modern agriculture.
The subgroup of digital economy and innovative services hosted by Tongji University received 39 start-up programs initiated by students and budding entrepreneurs from China and 14 African countries, including Nigeria and Ethiopia. Twenty-four of them made to the semi-final at Tongji last Saturday and five won the tickets to the final.
The winners included a team with three African students from Tongji and another two in-service officers from Morocco and Mauritius, who proposed a concpet of a fintech cross-border payment system between China and Africa.
Adeboye Awomuti, a member of the team from Nigeria and a doctoral student from Tongji, said their system, AfricPay, was designed to address the longstanding challenges in cross-border payments between Africa and China.
"Over the years, we have observed that when it comes to cross-border payment, buyers from Africa always have a problem in sourcing for dollar or RMB for exchange into occurrences that they could use to buy their products," he said. "This has limited trade between China and Africa.
"We are bringing a solution that would make it very easy and fast for traders in Africa to buy and to make their payments across to China in the sense that they can always pay with their local currencies.
"And the accounts of their Chinese sellers in China will reflect in RMB. We are trying to bring in Chinese technologies of block chain and artificial intelligence to make sure that all these are put in place and secured."
Awomuti said they will start trialling the system from Nigeria, the most populous country and largest economy in Africa, and then spread its reach across the African continent, connecting economies, reducing transactional barriers, and creating a corridor of financial growth and opportunities.
"AfricPay isn't just a fintech platform; it's the bridge that connects Africa and China, facilitating growth and prosperity," he said.
The other winning teams brought to the judges a solution for sustainable clean water supply and management in rural areas of sub-Sahara Africa; an e-commerce platform that enables multi-currency payments; a long-term project that aims to develop and modernize an existing private beach business in Djibouti while protecting endangered species; and a multi-language translation app that supports the function of mutual translation in 56 languages, including Hindi, English, and Marathi.
