This archive report was first published on 10 July 2019.
Published on July 10, 2019, by Reuben Njuguna, a renowned author and expert on industrial revolutions.
Kenya's pursuit of the Third Industrial Revolution, a digital revolution with a 2030 economic blueprint, is hindered by its reliance on carbon fuels, a driver of the first and second industrial revolutions.
The first industrial revolution was marked by a combination of communication, energy, and mobility, which powered mass printing and improved efficiency in communication, leading to affordable educational access worldwide.
The British created a platform for print and telegraph systems in the second half of the 19th Century, powered by cheap coal, leading to the ascendancy of steam engine-powered rail transportation and unified communication, energy, and transport.
The second industrial revolution was based on communication, energy-oil, and automobile mobility, with the invention of the telephone, centralised by electricity, radio, and television, cheap oils, and automobiles.
However, the Third Industrial Revolution is organised around distributed renewable energies, such as the sun, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean waves, and tides, which will be collected and shared over an energy internet to achieve optimum energy levels and maintain a high-performing, sustainable economy.
Germany and China are adopting an expanded generation of renewable energy, decentralising power sources to individual buildings and shifting power generation from the main grid to schools, offices, and private buildings.
Kenya can learn from these countries by investing in a renewable energy system and coupling it with its current infrastructural system, such as road, rail, power lines, and fibre networks, to achieve a distributed nature of Third World revolution infrastructure.
A more distributed and concerted industrial revolution will universally usher in a more distributed and collaborative sharing of productive wealth generated by society.
