Africa needs a concerted effort from all industry players and governments in order to avoid losing out to other regions as digitally transformed societies become the norm worldwide. This emerged from impassioned calls for coordinated action at the 2016 T-Systems In Touch Technology conference and World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa in Rwanda this week.

Gert Schoonbee, Managing Director at T-Systems South Africa said there is a threat of dire consequences if Africa does not capitalise on the technology revolution, particularly in cloud computing.

African public cloud providers will need to join forces where it makes sense if they are to participate meaningfully alongside global cloud computing services like Amazon and Microsoft's Azure, according to Schoonbee.

"Africa and South Africa will be colonised, but instead of taking our gold and our diamonds out of the country they will take our data. A layer of skills, jobs, SMMEs that we could have developed around data and computing capabilities will go with that. That is an ugly story, but I do think it can play itself out."

Schoonbee told ITWeb Africa that he believes inaction in the next three years will mean that the continent will miss out on opportunities in the global digital economy along with other developing regions worldwide. "The whole digital transformation journey is accelerating exponentially. I believe if we do not do something significant from an African perspective within the the next two to three years, then it will become very difficult to reverse the trend."

Schoonbee made suggestions for how an African response should be devised in the interest of achieving long term sustainability of many of the African companies.

"We can't stop the digital transformation era. We can only try to steer it to our benefit. Pure regulation is not the answer because the digital economy is a global economy and if you put up the borders it will just make us uncompetitive. We will need to make sure that we are good enough from a price point, security and functionality perspective in cloud. I believe that we need to create partnerships in South Africa and a non-competitive environment on basic cloud platforms in order to keep our data in the country, at a price point that is competitive and, more importantly, so that we can link with the big public cloud roadmaps and bring them to South Africa. We are engaging with some of our competitors on the topic."

Playing catchup

Schoonbee's plea for collaboration echoed a similar call by Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda at the WEF on Africa conference in Kigali.

Kagame expanded on how Africa can use the fourth industrial revolution to deliver economic growth and social prosperity.

"The fourth industrial revolution builds on previous ones which largely passed Africa by. As a result our continent barely registers in global; value chains. Africa can only claim its place at the table by earning it. Leapfrogging has its limits and we must remain mindful of the gaps that holds us back and be able to address them. Africa should not still be playing catch up by the time the fifth industrial revolution comes around. If we can use this time together to look for ways to harness the fourth industrial revolution for everyone's benefit based on the inherent dignity and value of each person then we really will have accomplished something useful."