CC Image courtesy of AntonyB.
Equal rights, despite uneven social standings prompted by prejudiced views of culture and gender, have been largely contested throughout history.
Complete accomplishment of equality as general perceived reality remains an aspiration almost as utopian an ideal as world peace.
While every unique individual has something original to offer, and difference should be celebrated, a platform of equality is hard to reach as different ideologies obscure agreement to relativism.
Enter: Technology, the great equaliser.
With no requirements based on skin colour, classified gender or accomplishments, technology serves to give any person in any place from any background an equal opportunity.
Accessibility definitely plays a role, which may be connected to the exciting, yet often barrier-like, differentiating personal factors.
As more stakeholders take up the duty to reach out to Africa and local developers improve their own communities with innovative solutions, the connection grows and provides more people with an even chance for interaction and enrichment.
Furthermore, the tools technology bring to the fore serve as instruments for progress, with which extraordinary minds can flourish in the creation of world-changing ideas materialised as value-adding developments.
With a growing startup scene across the continent, overseas investors progressively realise the potential lodged in previously disconnected societies, labelled ‘emerging markets’.
Now showing the world how it is done, more and more Africans can share their innovations providing the answers to local needs through technology-based creations.
While social media too often reflects or replicates the ills of society when community members respond with ignorance or arrogance, it is evident the uses of technology can be used for the good when an unprecedented opportunity is offered to the willing individual.
One of technology’s greatest aspects is its constant drive of evolution towards improvement for more convenient, affordable and swifter solutions.
Any aspect viewed or labelled as a backlog can frequently be solved with technology and is thus nullified by possibilities beyond human opinion, though developed by human experience.
Just like other universal languages, such as art, love or belief, technology is a unifier with possibilities of legacy immortalising the contributions made by lives open to opportunity regardless of perceived identity or inherited circumstances.
