Tremendous innovation is under way in Africa, with people shifting their perceptions of what to expect from the continent, says South African trends analyst, Dion Chang.

He told the seventh annual Green Building Convention, in Cape Town, that a wave of innovation was sweeping through Africa, with ideas being sparked from Kenya to Egypt.

Chang said innovations were springing up, such as in Nairobi, where the Silicon Savannah project is Africa’s answer to Silicone Valley, in California. The Kenyan government has ploughed an equivalent of US$14.5-billion into the project.

Innovators such as Joel Mwale, who founded Skydrop Enterprises, a producer and bottler of low-cost purified drinking water, and Tanzanian, Patrick Ngawi, who is bringing clean solar energy to Africa, and started the project when he was only 15.

South Africa’s Siybulela Xuza, who experimented mixing rocket fuel in his mother’s kitchen, won a scholarship to Harvard, and had had a minor planet named after him, is now working on micro fuel cells to charge electricity.

“We’re seeing a wave of lateral thinkers out of Africa,” Chang told the around 1 000 delegates to the convention, which is looking at how to transform the property industry to ensure that buildings are designed, built and operated in an environmentally sustainable way. 

In Lagos, four teenage girls have come up with a concept of generating electricity from urine, while in another development, the novel Makoko floating school, in crowded Lagos, has been built at a nominal cost of $6 250.

Chang said he saw tremendous opportunities in Africa, home to seven of the 10 fastest growing countries in the world, and a rapidly growing middle class.

He also predicted great opportunities in exporting African luxury goods and was seeing a rise in such goods - such as very successful luxury tea exports. While many African parents were very keen to send their children to study at universities in the UK and the US, he was seeing a commitment to come home and contribute to the building of the continent.

Chang said he foresaw a real awakening of Africa within the next 10 to 15 years, with young people driving much of the change.

Africa has a huge ‘youth bulge’ with 40% of its people falling into the 'millennial' age bracket of between 16 and 24. He said what he termed the ‘transition generation’, or teenagers below the age of 16, would need to deal with a ‘bottleneck of diminishing resources’ and come up with ways to counter this in a few year's time.

Change said United Nations statistics had shown that Africa would be home to two out of every five children in the world by 2050.

While the continent was developing, rapid urbanisation was set to be a major challenge. Currently, over two-thirds of Africa’s people live in urban areas and this is due to swell within the next 15 years.

Already, urbanisation is causing huge problems, such as in Lagos, a city of 11-million people, two-thirds of whom live in slums, and have to contend with overcrowding, power cuts and traffic jams.

Chang said Africans would need to rise to the challenge of making the continent more sustainable.