Yesterday, I addressed Yale students at the opening of the school’s annual Africa Innovation Symposium in New Haven, Connecticut. I am also teaching two sessions of an Economic Transformation Innovation Lab to undergraduate students majoring in Global Affairs and Economics at Yale, a one-time commitment I made immediately after the presidential election runoff.
Our case study: Utilizing Mobile Technology for Financial Inclusion & Civic Participation. I structured the class as policymakers at the African Union Summit to debate the constraints to 1) rolling out mobile technologies to support the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, and 2) ensuring election transparency and accountability in government on the Continent. I organized the class into the continent’s various regional economic blocks to look at these issues through the lenses of culture, politics, and technological transformation.
Today’s sessions will focus on policy recommendations from the regional blocks to the heads of state for addressing both. Our class is oversubscribed. My teaching assistant is Johan Zongo (upper left) a brilliant sophomore student studying Global Economics from Burkina Faso, working on fine-tuning the course.
While here, we will engage the university in establishing a future partnership with Liberia’s higher institutions of learning. I’m learning from these young African scholars as much as they hope to learn from me.
