Nigerian Youths tasked on innovation

 

Nigerian youths have been challenged to come up with innovations that could transform the health sector using data generation.

The call was made in Abuja on Thursday by scientists from Insilico Medicine led by Iraneus Ogu, while briefing the media on its new initiative called Longenesis; an application under the company’s Africa Intelligence (AI) project.

According to him, Longenesis is an application aimed at enabling individuals have greater control over the use of their data, including medical data, saying this would advance healthcare developments globally and enable more local development.

The scientist, who said the delegations plan was to transform the African healthcare and create a data-driven economy, regretted that Africa is still backward on innovations even when at school, African students top their classes in academic excellence.

He noted the absence of enabling environment for youths to thrive due to poor power supply, lack of funds and support from relevant agencies, as part of the challenges.

According to him, Africa will soon be a hub of data technology if young people are not deterred by these challenges.
He said, “UK African students top their classes in the schools they attend, while students from other countries follow, however, it is unfortunate that after school, the students from other countries who were not as brilliant as the Africans developed things that benefit their societies while the Africans fall behind.

“One of the reasons we are still behind is because after school youths lay more emphasis on survival rather than passion to change things and touch lives, we should all think beyond doing things for money-making alone, but what impact it will make.

“We are working to change the fundamental nature of the world’s digital economy. Currently, data about our likes, habits, demographic, and our biological profiles are captured in abundance but big companies profit from our data, not us.

” We want to flip this unfair payment paradigm on its head by creating an AI-driven global data marketplace by turning data into tradable commodities.”

 

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