Silicon Savanna: Mobile Phones Transform Africa

TIME Magazine ^ | June 30, 2011 | Alex Perry

[spetznaz]

The buzz at Pivot25, a conference for mobile-phone software developers and investors held this June, is all about the future of money. Ben Lyon, the 24-year-old business-development VP of Kopo Kopo, wants $250,000 to produce his app for shops to process payments made by text message. Paul Okwalinga, 28, describes his money app — called M-Shop, it allows you to buy travel tickets and takeout via mobile phone — as "not reinventing the wheel but pimping it." Kamal Budhabhatti, 35, claims Elma, the latest product from his company Craft Silicon, lets a phone do and be almost anything financial — act like a credit card or an online bank (a "digital wallet," he says), trade shares or forex, organize a company's payroll and (incidentally) surf the Web and phone home. Cash suddenly seems very old. The previous week, Joe Mucheru, a senior manager at Google, declared credit cards prehistoric. Adding to the giddy mood is the thought that the inventions on display might make some lucky Pivot25ers gazillionaires. And where are these extraordinary futures being imagined and plotted? The giraffes and zebras grazing in the game park outside rule out Silicon Valley, Seattle and Bangalore. Try Nairobi.

But this is not a story merely of how technology is changing Africa. Africans are changing technology right back. They now use text-message networks to send e mail, run social networks (South Africa's MXit) and even verify from a bar code whether a drug is genuine or fake (mPedigree in Ghana and Sproxil in Nigeria). Africa's influence on global technology is most marked in mobile banking: with its M Pesa service (M for mobile, pesa meaning money in Swahili), Kenyan operator Safaricom became the first-ever telecom company to create a mass mobile-banking service, setting industry standards now being copied from California to Kabul.

[spetznaz]

Africans, and Kenyans in particular, are making their presence felt online too. When Kenya erupted in violence in the aftermath of a disputed general election in late 2007, a handful of Nairobi code writers created Ushahidi (meaning testimony in Swahili), a data-mapping platform to collate and locate reports of unrest sent in by the public via text message, e mail and social media. The idea was simply to find out what was happening. Says Ushahidi co-founder Juliana Rotich: "The TV was playing The Sound of Music while we could see houses burning in our neighborhood." But the desire to know what's going on turned out to be universal, and Ushahidi quickly became the world's default platform for mapping crises, disasters and political upheaval. According to Rotich, by May of this year, Ushahidi, which is free to download, had been used 14,000 times in 128 countries to map everything from last year's earthquake in Haiti to this year's Japanese tsunami and the Arab Spring.

As a result, Internet traffic in Africa is among the fastest growing in the world. "This is a tidal wave of activity crossing the continent," says Ben White, a blogger and the founder of VC4Africa, which connects African tech entrepreneurs with mentors and financiers. Google says online advertising in 2010 saw 5.2 billion clicks on African sites vs. 3.7 billion in Western Europe. "The pace is amazing. It's lightning speed," says Mucheru, who heads Google's sub-Saharan Africa office. The Web's economic effect echoes that of mobiles: a 2009 World Bank study found every 10% rise in high-speed connections raises growth by 1.3%.

[spetznaz]

Another related article:

Kenya's Silicon Savannah to challenge India on IT

[spetznaz]

Ping 1

[AfricanChristian]

Makes sense, Kenya is not too far from India, relatively stable and has a large English speaking population.

Now all that Chinese and Indian investment in Kenya is beginning to look smart. (Kenya isn’t really natural resource rich - apart from Wildlife and Agriculture).

In next 20 - 30 years, there will be spectacular successes in Africa as well as probably some spectacular failures. The key to smart investment is understanding where to put your money.

[lentulusgracchus]

"The TV was playing The Sound of Music while we could see houses burning in our neighborhood." But the desire to know what's going on turned out to be universal, and Ushahidi quickly became the world's default platform for mapping crises, disasters and political upheaval.

They could use this service in Milwaukee, Chicago, and south Florida, among other places Obozo's flash mobs are operating and trying their wings.

[lentulusgracchus]

Kenya isn’t really natural resource rich - apart from Wildlife and Agriculture

Not yet, anyway. The Great Rift Valley has just established big production at its northern end, in Israel, where Noble Affiliates (the old Samedan) has a big gas discovery. There's been other rift-zone production from the Gulf of Suez for years, and exploration is continuing.

Political factors have slowed E&P efforts in sub-Saharan Africa except for Angola and Cabinda and West Africa for years. That may end soon.

[the invisib1e hand]

I clicked into this thread because I'm interested in the way media affects non-literate cultures (per McLuhan's definition) but what I'm faced with is a sample of the intelligence of the future executive of global commerce:

"not reinventing the wheel but pimping it."

Beam me up, Scotty.

[spetznaz]

I think using a single phrase as a base for estimating (or discarding) intelligence may be a tad myopic, don't you think? While I personally would have used a different phrase, that is largely linguistic semantics. It is like someone refering to the magazine of a pistol as a 'clip' ...most firearms enthusiasts will automatically discredit the person (usually a journalist who cannot differentiate between an air pistol, a kalashnikov, and a late '70s Volkswagen), but they wil not say the gun is cr@p because someone referred to its magazine as a 'clip' rather than using the correct lexicology. Same thing here ...someone talking about 'pimping' technology doesn't mean that they are exuding a certain 'inner city mentality' (I am really trying to parse my words LOL). Actually, you would be surprised about some of the opinions young educated Africans (both in the US and in Africa) have about urban American youth (again, really parsing word choice). A linguistic allusion that may be taken in, or exude a, negative context from a certain perspectives(e.g. 'pimping' something as seen from the lens of American urban youth) cannot be broadly applied evaluate the intellect (or lack of) of a different culture, particularly when the individual who made the comment is doing something with himself or herself that 92% of those who would use the same exact phrase in an 'urban American setting' wouldn't be doing anything similar. It is like Apple's Steve Jobs using the word 'bling' ...quite a dollop of difference compared to the same word (with the same meaning) being used in Compton.

[the invisib1e hand]

I think using a single phrase as a base for estimating (or discarding) intelligence may be a tad myopic, don't you think?

Nope. But I do think oil and water will mix before you'll get my point.

[spetznaz]

Fine by me. Have a good day sir.

[Moltke]

The key to smart investment is understanding where to put your money.