Hope Or Hype: The Revolution In Africa Will Be Wireless

The continent of Africa has long been seen as the place where humanitarian aid and World Bank loans go — to attempt to save lives or to dictate how countries should grow.

Now there’s a new movement underway — a technology movement. Young entrepreneurs from the continent are protesting the old ways by launching startups that, they say, will put Africans in the driver’s seat. But not everyone agrees that technology is the solution to Africa’s problems.

Gregory Rockson, 24, is definitely in the pro-tech camp. He started the tech company mPharma in his home country, Ghana, to improve health care.

Rockson had been living in San Francisco, thinking about working for giants like Google, when he learned about a problem back home: People were dying of treatable diseases because they couldn’t access available medicine quickly enough.

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