France is wrestling with a burden of debts and public deficits that led Standard & Poor’s recently to downgrade its credit rating. Even as the risk of recession looms, the country has been forced to implement a drastic austerity program. But France’s woes are also being felt far beyond its borders, sparking rumors of a possible devaluation of the CFA franc, the common currency of the franc zone, which comprises 14 African countries and the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean.

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Upon reviewing the current upheavals in North Africa and elsewhere on the continent, I felt it is necessary for us – African academics, scholars and intellectuals – to take stock and a fresh look at ourselves: What role have we played in advancing the cause of liberty and improving governance in post colonial Africa. Our record is not very good. Sometimes, self-criticism is necessary in order for us to make progress. You do not have to agree with what I am going to say – diversity of opinion is healthy. There have been outstanding individuals among us who risked death to champion the cause of freedom in Africa. However, as a group we have let Africa down badly by not providing intellectual leadership to the democratic struggle.

“He who doesn’t know where he came from doesn’t know where is going,” says an African proverb. We of the intellectual community are lost; we don’t know where we are going. The recent upheavals in Africa caught us completely off guard. We did not see it coming because we were pre-occupied elsewhere. It seems we are way behind the curve, late to the struggle for democracy in Africa and are now only playing “catch-up.”

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When thinking of tech hubs, Africa doesn’t exactly spring to mind. But the continent has had some amazing spurts of open innovation, with 45 collaborative hubs now open.

Africa faces some hurdles in developing information technology. Even though global Internet penetration is about 32%, it’s lower in Africa, where only around 11% of the population have access to the Internet through a computer or mobile phone. Within the continent, too, there are enormous divides. While a country like Nigeria has 28% of its population online, Ethiopia has less than 1%. But all that is changing: Internet usage in Africa has grown faster than on any other continent over the past decade.

So what exactly do tech hubs do? In the African continent, they train, connect, and encourage innovation. Here’s a closer look

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Jason Njorku, the maverick Nigerian internet entrepreneurand founder of Iroko Partners, the holding company behind the immensely successfulNollywoodLove, just confirmed to me that his company has raised $8 million in venture capital from Tiger Global Management, a New York-based private equity and hedge fund run by billionaire Chase Coleman, and other investors.

Iroko Partners is the world’s largest digital distributor of Nigerian movies and African music. The firm is YouTube’s biggest partner in Africa, boasting over 152 million views in 2011. They also have lucrative content distribution deals with Dailymotion, iTunes, Amazon and Vimeo.

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Wade started the company in 2004 and within five years had raised $30 million in venture capital. That was great news but had drawbacks. Other parties became increasingly influential regarding the styling, positioning, and content of the brand.  Wade did not like the direction, so she stepped down as Adina’s CEO in 2009, but held onto a stake.

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When he completed his studies, in 1999, he applied for several engineering jobs in Cameroon but, in spite of having a doctorate, he did not get any replies.

He then designed his dream machine and started to make peanut powder. To advertise it and to make ends meet, he worked as a cook for a year in the capital, Yaounde.

“In 2000 I started to cook groundnut sauce with rice on the road. It was so difficult. Some of my friends called me a madman. ‘Are you sure that you have a PhD?’,” Mr Nyamen told the BBC Africa’s Randy Joe Sa’ah.

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Erick Njenga, a 21-year-old college senior wrapping up his business IT degree at Nairobi’s Strathmore University, has a gap-toothed grin and a scraggly goatee. A mild-mannered son of auditors, he didn’t say much as we tucked into a lunch of grilled steak, rice, and fruit juice at an outdoor café amid the din of the city’s awful traffic. But his code had done the talking. Last year Njenga and three classmates developed a program that will let thousands of Kenyan health workers use mobile phones to report and track the spread of diseases in real time—and they’d done it for a tiny fraction of what the government had been on the verge of paying for such an application. Their success—and that of others in the nation’s fast-growing startup scene—demonstrates the emergence of a tech-savvy generation able to address Kenya’s public-health problems in ways that donors, nongovernmental organizations, and multinational companies alone cannot.

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When Olivier Nizeyimana was a student, the journey to Rwanda’s National University would sometimes take him ages so he thought it would be a good idea to start a bus company that made punctuality one of its core values… In 1999, he launched his Volcanoes Transport Company.”I had only one route. Then I’ve been expanding all the way. Now we have a really big company which is networking all the towns of the southern region of Rwanda, linking them with the capital, Kigali,” he said.

On the company’s growth:

The entrepreneur believes that at the moment his business is worth more than $3m.”When I started, I had four staff with myself and now I have about 250,”

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