Africa has registered impressive economic growth over the past decade and a half, displaying remarkable resilience in the midst of volatility and turmoil in global markets. Time is now ripe for the continent to turn the chapter and embark on a journey towards a major economic transformation. For this, Africa needs a new economic growth model powered by the strength of the real economy, entrepreneurship and innovation. A new report from Intellecap explores the critical role emerging technologies can play in helping Africa address its age-old development challenges and achieve exponential growth over the next decade. They researched and interviewed a range of emerging technology specialists from around the world and experts with deep experience on the social entrepreneurship and impact space in Africa.

The Centre Valbio research station, a modern building of stone and glass set in the jungled hills at the edge of Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park, was starting to look like the third season of The Wire. Big tackboards lined the walls, each one covered with dozens of pinned-up photographs. Some images were grouped together in families, while others floated alone, unconnected. It was 2012, and Rachel Jacobs was using Detective McNulty-style tactics to sort out the associations in a very different kind of crew: the park's population of red-bellied lemurs. A biological anthropologist, Jacobs was studying how color vision evolved in lemurs, which meant keeping track of more than 100 animals.

IT is no longer news that Nigeria is in a serious recession with a very high misery index. So, as year 2016 Christmas approached, those living in the country were advised by experts in money management to conserve whatever little funds they had at their disposal. They particularly advised that folks should stay at home, travel less, spend less, cut out on luxury items and save more, as the economic headwinds in the country will continue well into 2017. So, I struggled to convince myself to stay put at home for the Christmas and New Year. However, the allure of the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) was too strong for me to resist, thus compelling me to set out for the CES 2017, which is hosted annually in the city of Las Vegas, United States of America.

What can community managers learn from game designers? Game design isn't limited to the video game field. It's also one of the oldest practices in the world, and can teach us a great deal about building online communities. The practice of game design started with tabletop games, dating as far back as 3500 BC in Predynastic Egypt with the game of Senet. The first recorded sport was a footrace from the Olympic Games in 760 BC.

In 2012, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Madagascar natives as the most endangered mammals on the planet. But a team of researchers have developed a system called LemurFaceID, which uses facial-recognition software to spot lemurs in their natural habitat. "The original inspiration for developing LemurFaceID was a desire to develop a noninvasive tool that would help us ID and track lemurs," Stacey Tecot, University of Arizona assistant professor and senior researcher of the project, told Digital Trends. To minimize invasiveness, Tecot and her colleague, George Washington University's Rachel Jacobs, decided not to capture or tag their subjects, but soon found that such a hands-off approach made collecting sufficient datasets difficult. "I'd explored using dye via a gentle water gun, but didn't get very far with that," Tecot said.

Facial recognition technology used to identify criminals can also identify lemurs with a near perfect level of accuracy. The system, called LemurFaceID, is a facial recognition system that works by identifying individual lemurs based on photographs of them. The system can facilitate the long-term research of known individual lemurs, which could help with understanding how lemurs evolve and how to best conserve them. The LemurFaceID system scored 98.7 per cent accuracy after 100 trials of using the system. Amateur photographers took photos of the lemurs in Ranomafana National Park (RNP), a rainforest in southeastern Madagascar.

John Nhial was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He spent four years fighting, blasting away on guns almost too heavy to hold, until one day the inevitable happened: he was seriously injured, treading on a landmine while he was on morning patrol. "I stepped on it and it exploded," he recalled. "It threw me up and down again – and then I tried to look for my leg and found that there was no foot." His comrades carried him back to base camp, but there was hardly any medical care available. It took 25 days before he received proper treatment, during which time he developed tetanus down one side of his body.

February 18, 2017 --Observing lemurs in the jungles of Madagascar is no easy task. "We find the group," explains Stacey Tecot, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona's School of Anthropology, "and then we watch them for a little bit, we get our bearings ... and then we start to collect our data." Doing so is an all-day process of recording each individual, more or less continuously. But lemurs typically live in "troops" of up to 15 individuals. To get solid data, Dr. Tecot tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview, "you really have to know that who you're watching is who you think you're watching."

Lual Mayen, a 24-year-old software engineer, is determined to do what he can to bring change to South Sudan, a country ripped apart by civil war. Through the use of board and video games, he wants to promote unity and spread his message of peace throughout the world. "After the conflicts that started in 2013, I saw the horrible effects mass displacement could have with my own eyes. I witnessed it in IDP and refugee camps, but also online," Mayen told Al Jazeera. "These social clubs, both online and offline, were turned into sites for social evils and I could see the conflict brewing among various tribes that were crammed together. I knew that these scenarios could turn political and even physical, with people wanting revenge for what was happening to them."

The retail space is changing drastically through the evolution of technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), which can offer retailers better control over stock flows and better customer service. This technology, and in particular machine learning, can step in to help retailers cater to the needs of their customers in smarter ways. Retail goods, even the most niche products, are becoming more and more commoditised and price parity means retailers have to look continuously for more innovative ways to keep customers loyal. A high-end jewellery retailer, a sporting goods store and a grocer all have very different target markets and their customer's behaviour patterns are very different, but the beauty of machine learning, an emerging technology, is that it quickly adapts to any type of environment. Machine learning is a form of AI that allows computers to learn without being programmed.