Existing computing systems in Africa fail to allow electronic government service systems to be citizen-engaged, according to the chief scientist at IBM Africa Dr. Osamuyimen (Uyi) Stewart.

From Nigeria to Rwanda, African nations have started switching on to e-government services in a bid to fast-track processes such as government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-business (G2B) processes

But Dr. Stewart -- speaking at the AITEC East Africa ICT Summit being held in Nairobi -- said that for Africa to move forward, there is a need to stop adopting e-government strategies from the West and instead develop local e-government systems that will embrace citizen participation.

“Current computing systems are rigid, they cannot handle surprises and they don’t learn,” Stewart said.

Stewart went on to call for the implementation of cognitive computing systems for the intelligent interpretation of data.

Cognitive computers are able to predict, interact and learn.

IBM’s most prominent example of cognitive computing technology is Watson, which is an artificially intelligent computer system that answers questions posed in natural language. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on US quiz show Jeopardy! but its capabilities are being extended to the likes of the medical industry as well.

Meanwhile, IBM’s Stewart said the technology company has partnered with uReport in Uganda to make data more sensible to governments.

uReport allows users to send text messages about a crisis in their area and it can then be mapped out.

A key problem that uReport faced, though, was that the data coming in was now too much for the system.

Subsequently, IBM initiated cognitive computing 1.0 and now even the government has a way of looking at the data that aids it in decision making, said Stewart.

“Ugandans found a way to use their platform to highlight other issues affecting them,” Stewart said.

Dr. Stewart is the chief scientist of Africa’s first IBM research laboratory in Nairobi, Kenya.

Dr. Stewart has 20 years experience in software research and product development related to human-computer interaction, including speech, web interfaces, machine translation, mobile computing, natural language processing, and social collaboration or crowdsourcing, according to the IBM website.