AWS Public Sector Blog
The role AWS is playing in Prosper Africa Tech initiatives
Figure 1. The Farmer’s app connects farmers with reliable buyers in Botswana.
In December 2022, the Biden administration announced an ambitious new program at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit: the Digital Transformation with Africa (DTA) initiative. This effort aims to dramatically expand digital access, digital literacy, and digital-enabling environments across the African continent over the next decade.
At the heart of the initiative lies the Prosper Africa Tech for Trade Alliance, a collaboration uniting leading American and African tech companies behind the mission of accelerating e-commerce and digital trade in Africa. As a pivotal component within the broader DTA initiative, this alliance pools the resources and expertise of its partners to tackle major legal, regulatory, and logistical obstacles that have hindered the growth of digital trade historically.
By fostering seamless e-commerce and creating a fertile landscape for digital innovation, the Tech for Trade Alliance seeks to unlock the immense potential of digital technologies to empower African businesses and energize economic development across the region.
The strategic purpose behind the Prosper Africa Tech for Trade Alliance
The past decade has witnessed rapid gains in internet access and digital connectivity across much of Africa. However, significant gaps remain in the usage of digital tools for trade and commerce. The Tech for Trade Alliance aims to harness American technological prowess and African market knowledge to close these gaps.
The Alliance brings together major players from US and African private sectors, government agencies, and civil society to focus on the strategic purpose of making digital trade flows easier, cheaper, and more efficient. The partners are collaborating to build a robust digital infrastructure and harmonize policies and regulations to enable seamless cross-border e-commerce within Africa and beyond.
This will empower local African companies to expand their customer base and enable access to wider export markets globally. By driving enterprise growth and job creation, digital trade holds immense potential as an engine of inclusive economic development in Africa. The Tech for Trade Alliance reflects a recognition that realizing this potential requires coordinated public-private partnerships guided by a shared vision of the future.
An impactful model for public-private coordination: AWS and Choppies
The recently announced collaboration between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Choppies, a leading supermarket chain in Botswana, exemplifies the Alliance’s model of impact-oriented public-private partnerships. This effort focused on enabling the deployment of Choppies’ state-of-the-art Farmer’s app across its supplier network.
Figure 2. Screenshots of the Farmer’s app hosted on AWS.
The proposed idea is to digitally integrate smallholder farmers into Choppies’ supply chain, to overhaul procurement operations to allow fresh produce to swiftly reach store shelves. Facilitated through the coordination framework of the Alliance, this partnership highlights the force-multiplying value of targeted private sector support for public goals of digital transformation and enterprise formalization. AWS proposed an enhanced solution to Choppies’ application by leveraging its cloud capabilities and distribution infrastructure. AWS is closely working with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help Choppies transition from an analog supply network to a seamless digital system. This collaboration will revolutionize market access and income stability for more than 8,000 small-scale farmers by fostering their integration into the digital economy. The Choppies case illuminates a model of shared value creation that advances both commercial objectives and national development priorities. By facilitating replicable public-private partnerships like this, the Tech for Trade Alliance aims to unleash the multiplier effects of e-commerce across communities and markets in Africa.
Solution architecture
- It all begins with the user accessing the Choppies mobile app, a user-friendly interface designed for a seamless shopping experience.
- Upon user requests, the mobile app triggers AWS Lambda functions, the backbone of Choppies’ serverless architecture. These Lambda functions act as orchestrators, managing the flow of data and processes.
- Lambda invokes Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to fetch static content, such as images and product information, ensuring a responsive and engaging user interface.
- Simultaneously, Lambda interacts with databases to retrieve dynamic content, including real-time pricing, product availability, and personalized recommendations.
- The Lambda-assembled response, containing both static and dynamic elements, is sent back to the user, creating a personalized and engaging customer experience
- In parallel, IoT devices in Choppies warehouses continuously send information about new stock arrivals. This data is critical for maintaining accurate inventory levels and ensuring products are readily available.
- Lambda functions react to incoming IoT data by triggering requests for inventory addition.
- The fabric client successfully adds this inventory to the supplier database in Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB), providing transparency and traceability.
- As products are sold, the IoT devices send real-time information.
- Lambda functions respond by initiating requests to remove the sold stock from the supplier database to the retail database.
- The removal requests are sent to AMB, where they are executed securely and efficiently, updating the blockchain with the latest transaction details.
- The entire ecosystem’s health and performance are monitored in real-time through AWS IoT Core. Monitoring data includes system metrics, user interactions, and inventory movements.
- Monitoring data is ingested seamlessly into Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, streamlining the process of collecting and preparing data for further analysis.
- Finally, all the ingested data is plotted and visualized using Amazon QuickSight, providing Choppies with actionable insights for informed decision-making and strategic planning.
Figure 3. AWS architecture for the Choppies solution described in this blog post. The core components include Amazon Managed Blockchain, AWS IoT Core, and AWS Lambda.
The AWS commitment to Prosper Africa’s vision
As a leader in cloud computing technologies, AWS is proud to be closely aligned with the forward-looking mission of Prosper Africa. AWS has a long-standing commitment to deploy its technological capacity and ecosystem support in service of Africa’s growth story. The ethos of imaginative innovation and social responsibility underpinning Prosper Africa powerfully resonates with the cultural values and vision at AWS.
Through strategic partnerships and collaboration within the Alliance framework
AWS seeks to contribute enterprise-grade solutions that can drive systemic progress towards Prosper Africa’s aims of digital transformation and trade expansion. Such partnerships reflect the AWS philosophy of using its core strengths in cloud technologies and supply chain operations in collaborative approaches guided by the public interest.
AWS recognizes that realizing the full promise of digital innovation in Africa requires cooperative action across sectors. Private technology partners bring critical capabilities, but need coordination with public policy leaders who understand national and local contexts. The Alliance enables such coordination, allowing AWS to deploy its tools and cloud infrastructure responsibly and effectively to expand digital access and inclusion.
The Tech for Trade Alliance offers a pathbreaking forum for AWS to join forces with committed partners from industry and government in tackling barriers to digital trade. By melding its technological expertise with policy insights from public sector allies, AWS seeks to empower African enterprises to access global markets and build resilience through technology.
Conclusion
With the audacious but vital vision of the DTA initiative, the US has kickstarted an agenda that could catalyze Africa’s economic ascent globally through trade-enabled growth in the 21st century digital economy. The Prosper Africa Tech for Trade Alliance lies at the beating heart of this promise, forging a multistakeholder coalition united by the mammoth but achievable goal of an Africa leapfrogging through digitally powered trade.
AWS is proud to be a key accomplice and enabler within this Alliance, cocreating partnerships like the Choppies Farmer’s app collaboration. Such cooperation epitomizes the philosophy of shared value creation and mutually reinforcing outcomes that undergirds the Alliance. With enabling support from partners like AWS, Prosper Africa’s policy breakthroughs and technical assistance are laying vital foundations and building capacities for thriving digital trade ecosystems across Africa.
By aligning the strengths of public and private sectors behind the intertwined goals of digital transformation and trade expansion, Prosper Africa promises to unleash a favorable cycle of youth-led entrepreneurship, market integration, and sustainable prosperity across Africa in the decades ahead. AWS remains committed to lending its capabilities and collaborating responsibly with partners to help translate this promise into reality.