Kenya Shines Globally as Africa’s Leading Innovative Economy

World Intellectual Property Organization has in it’s Global Innovation Index 2019, ranked Kenya the second-best Technology hub in Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2019, Kenya’s innovative strength comes second to South Africa while Mauritius was ranked third.

As innovative strength is determined by the development level of a country, Kenya has been said to be performing better than most African countries in the last few years.

The fact that Kenyans are privileged in terms of getting easy access to credit and microfinance loans for startups make it possible for innovators to achieve their goals.

For nine consecutive years, Kenya is said to have scaled the heights of innovations, recording excellent performance comparable to lower-middle-income countries such as India, Vietnam, and Moldova.

Besides Kenya, other African countries that are said to be doing well in the previous eight years are Malawi, Rwanda, Mozambique and Madagascar.

Noting that middle-income countries are fast rising up the innovation ladder, the report shows that expenditures are still concentrated in high-income economies.

GII 2019 also shows that while other countries produce more from their innovations, others produce a lower level of output, giving an example of high economies such as Switzerland, Netherlands, and Sweden which produce more and United Arab Emirates and Singapore producing less output relative to their input.

In determining innovation strength, GII looks at three parameters which are; Local universities, internationalization of patented inventions and the quality of scientific publications.

Through this formula, GII survey ranked the United States at the first position, followed by Germany and Japan at the second and third position respectively.

In the 2019 global report, Switzerland still regains the first position, Sweden comes second while the United States comes in third.

South Africa, Kenya, and Mauritius were ranked 63^rd, 77^th and 82^nd respectively which makes them the top three African countries.

The most important thing according to the survey is the fact that both developed and developing countries are improving as days go by.

The research hopes that in the coming years, there will be medical innovations such as mobile health applications to help improve the world’s health quality.

Read Also: Three Kenyan SME’s Win a Fully Funded Trip to the Oslo Innovation Week, Norway