Triple-Win User Innovation Network and Facilitated All-Inclusive Collective Enterprise (TWUINFAICE): A Postdoctoral Research Agenda for Turning the Youth Bulge in Africa into Blessing

Abstract

Eradicating abject poverty, realising social development and environmental sustainability are among the core focus of the UN millennium development goals. In Africa, realising such triple-win outcomes poses running challenges due to persistent youth bulge and growing unemployment and their attendant youth violence and crimes. Notwithstanding, in all societies, youths generally have remarkable inherent qualities that befit entrepreneurship. Importantly, with youths’ high degree of sociability, it is possible to use collaborative networks and network effect to channel those sterling youths’ attributes and potentials towards realising triple-win entrepreneurship agenda. Most of all, continuing advances in computing, communication and social networking technologies and the widespread democratisation of tools of production and distribution, make it easier for youths to connect horizontally with peers and vertically with experts and institutions in order to individually and collectively innovate and reach their entrepreneurship goals easier and better. Yet, experts have noted that active participation of actors in collective process does not just happen; it requires a facilitator with requisite tools and strategies to initiate, control, manage and sustain the participation. Consequently, all-out triple-win entrepreneurship drive is advocated in this paper for African nations to turn the youth bulge into blessing. The work presented in this paper is a postdoctoral research agenda for community informatics social technologies embodied in the acronym TWUINFAICE and designed to facilitate triple-win development in the developing countries of Africa. Above all, TWUINFAICE upholds user innovation network and collective entrepreneurship that is built on scalable and reusable social network structures as the bedrock of its strategies for realising the triple-win objectives across Africa. Finally, this paper presents TWUINFAICE concepts, models and some selected areas of immediate application in the developing countries of Africa.