Silicon Savanna - How Technology In Africa Is Changing The Globe
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:13
It's a real, real honour to be here in front of you, to be at Republica.
00:20
It's a brilliant conference. I'm very thankful that I can represent not only myself, not only my country, but also the continent in some respects. And hopefully, as we get to know each other and as you get to know my story and I get to know yours, hopefully we can discover something new. So, Time magazine, famous magazine, brilliant magazine, and in January 1984, they ran a
00:49
cover story. Speaks for itself, Africa's Woes, Cools, Conflicts and Corruption. And these three things dominated the discussion around the African continent. And the truth is that up to today, a lot of people still seem to associate this with the
01:10
African continent. There's two main stereotypes you could say that personify people's ideas about the African continent.
01:20
One, war, crisis, poverty, guns. You've seen it, you've heard it, I don't need to repeat it. The second, is it more exotic, right? So beautiful vistas of gazelles, antelopes, everything you can imagine. And these are the main areas which seem to dominate trains of thought when it comes
01:46
to the African continent. So much so, that years later, you could say, 16 years later or so, the Economist ran a very interesting, this is the year 2000, actually this month in the year 2000,
02:04
they ran a cover story and made a very declarative statement on Africa, calling it the hopeless continent. And all this would really lead you to believe that if all this were true, that if all this actually summed up the sum total of all these people on this vast expanse, this
02:23
continent, then what more is there really to learn? What more is there to know about Africa, besides our uncle with a large inheritance which he seemed to leave you and contact you by his cousins on email? We've all been there, we've all gotten that.
02:42
But there's so much more that's underrepresented, you could say, and I think one of the best ways to show and showcase this is with an analogy. And it has more meanings than one. If you remember NASA, big, big portrait of the world by night, covering the entire
03:10
expanse of the earth, watching and looking for where the bright lights shine, where people are, where electricity is, civilization, if you like. That's become an iconic image that describes the world.
03:23
And if you look, you'll see for yourself that in more ways than one, Africa is the dark continent, an absence of light in this particular picture bearing testament to that. And yet, if we look at some work that came out of Facebook last year as well, or in
03:44
2010 rather, by an intern in the data visualization department, and we look at the Facebook network all across the world, we see a very interesting pattern, and there's a gentleman who actually went to the extent of combining both photos and overlaying them
04:03
to see what happened. Might not be as clear here, but we'll zoom in on Africa in a second. But what you find is a question bigger than NASA could ever present to you, and that is if indeed there's no electricity, if indeed there is no light, and yet the presence of people is there, and, you know, the presence of some level of technology, then what gaps
04:24
are we missing when Facebook shows us, you know, what it does with all those connections coming in and to Africa? If we look at Africa here, it's not as clear here, I apologize, but what you'll see when you overlay the two images is three or four hot spots.
04:43
In sub-Saharan Africa, it's in West Africa, it's around Nigeria and Ghana. In East Africa, it centers around Kenya and Tanzania, and in all through southern Africa, it's present, and what this tells us is that there's more to this entire debate, and there's more to the hopeless continent than meets the eye, and technology is the
05:02
key to that entire debate. So if we look at some statistics that McKinsey did in a recent study a few years ago called clowns on the prowl, they found out that the GDP of all these African countries combined came to 1.6 trillion US dollars, and this is close, and present-day especially, much
05:26
closer if not past Russia or Brazil, and if we look at the African consumer, their spending power was largely estimated to be around 860 million dollars plus.
05:41
Now, of all the cities in Africa, there's over 52 cities with over a million people in each one of them. Fast forward to the year 2020, and the GDP has grown to 2.6 trillion dollars, even amidst crises and, as we've seen in the couple of recent weeks, a double-dip recession in
06:05
a lot of developed countries. Consumer spending power has grown tremendously to 1.4 trillion dollars, and more Africans, 50 per cent more, have moved towards cities by this year.
06:20
Now, that, among a lot of other factors, is what led The Economist 11 years later to come full circle and release this cover, which some of you may have seen recently, which shared a new perspective on Africa and termed it as Africa rising. Now, part of the reason, or one way to describe the risen Africa or the rising Africa,
06:48
if you like, goes towards the title. So whether we call it Tech Africa or the Silicon Savannah, if you like, the name is not as important as the movement and as the series of changes that are taking place on the
07:05
continent that leads not only from an economic point of view, but an innovation and business point of view globally that are going to shape this debate. So I think, to sort of put some of this in context, we need to re-understand or get reacquainted with what the African continent is, and one of my favourite images to do that
07:26
is an infographic by a gentleman called Kai Kraus, and he looked at the true size of Africa. A lot of times, Africa is just a passing idea in our minds, and yet here we visualise and look and see exactly how many countries it can hold. I won't spell it out for you.
07:41
China, India, Eastern Europe, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the US, and if you look, you know, through the legend, there's a couple of other countries as well. This is the size, geographically, of the continent, and the numbers that I shared before cover some of the small idiosyncrasies behind it. Now, if we look at the people beyond just this geographic expanse, it's people.
08:04
There's 1.2 billion people on the African continent today, over 620 million mobile phone subscribers, 140 million internet users, and over 2,600 languages summed up in this one space. That's 2,600 local cultures to address, and so even the term African is as ambiguous
08:26
as the term European, is as ambiguous as the term North American, right? I'm a Kenyan, and then I'm an African, in that order, and that's something which a lot of times no-one might pay attention to, but over the coming years, as we begin to get a better view of Africa and Africa takes its presence on the world stage,
08:44
we'll begin to see this. Now, with all this said, there's one particular quote that sort of sums up that introduction to Africa, and I love it so much because I think it speaks not only to me, but hopefully at the end of this presentation to you as well, and I look forward to engaging around
09:02
it. Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter, and so the better educated you are, the better we understand what's coming from the African continent, the better we know what to expect and how to respond to it. Now, in 2002, there was over 49 million smartphones in Africa, and now we've seen
09:24
them grow to 620 million, with 735 million by the end of this year. But numbers don't tell the true story. Numbers don't really get us acquainted with what's happening there. Now, much of the developed world, you could say, isn't used to seeing phones
09:41
like this, and now it's smartphones, it's the iPhone of all phones, dominating conversations across the developed world, and yet this, the Nokia 1110, this in particular, known in Kenya as the Mulika Muizi, which is a very funny analogy around, it's flashlight,
10:02
it's useful, and this is one of the highest-selling smartphones by Nokia itself, and this really captures part of the sentiment of how many people have, you know, access to a mobile phone in Africa today is actually more than people with access to the radio, you know, another
10:21
level of mass media that we've come, to become acquainted with. Now, as we look towards this and get better acquainted with what Africa's doing in terms of mobile, we need to take a step back and look at how the entire world has experienced the internet up to today. Now, this is a mobile, I mean, this is a call box graveyard, if you like, and this is a stage
10:46
that entirely passed Africa, the stage of fixed lines, and the age of experiencing the internet on a computer, on a personal computer, on a PC or a Mac, if you like. That entire stage is being questioned now, its relevance is being questioned, and a lot
11:03
of times, it's been deemed unnecessary, and what we'll find with a lot of the innovation coming out of Africa is that it completely goes against the historical status quo, in that you experience the internet through a PC and then some sort of handheld device, be it a laptop, be it a smartphone, be it a tablet, and just going straight towards
11:23
a mobile phone and seeing what can you do and what can you innovate in and around that. So, one story in particular that I think sums this up is the story of the ideas, which is a Kenyan story like none other. So, people always ask the question, what would happen if there was a $100 smartphone?
11:45
It would change the world, it would change the way people consume information and data, and in Kenya, it did. This $100 smartphone made by Chinese manufacturer Huiwei came into the market almost, unbeknownst to many, a little bit of a buzz, but not much, and in the space of one year,
12:02
completely turned the smartphone market in Kenya, Android, and got an entirely new segment of people aspiring for a smartphone, using a smartphone, and a touch screen one at that. Beginning what has started for Kenya, a revolution towards the smartphones and cost effective ones, competing on price and competing on what they can offer the consumer.
12:25
Now, it's going to continue to disrupt and bring about different levels of innovation to us, leaving the typical pattern, the typical state of things in question.
12:40
According to studies by the London Business School, the World Bank, and consultants at Deloitte, for every 10 additional mobile phones per 100 Africans, the GDP is expected to rise. So, the actual economy of the country is expected to rise, possibly up to 1.2%. But none of these statistics really tell the story. None of these really speak to what's going on.
13:02
And one of the best examples is M-Pesa. Now, M for mobile and Pesa meaning money in Swahili. This is truly one of the things that has put Kenya and continues to put Africa on the global map.
13:21
Using SMS technology, it allows two people, wherever they are in the country, to send and receive money from each other without any need of a bank or any sort of financial institution whatsoever. Now, that may not sound too interesting until you hear exactly how this has grown and specifically how people have used it to change our country.
13:44
So, 37,000 agents across the country and 15 million people using this service, which basically means it's everything from I walk outside this room and find one man who is an agent, or I go into a mall and find a retail store that's full of agents who can serve me and allow me to deposit money into my phone.
14:05
But again, it's what people have done with it that's partly the reason it's gotten so successful. The technology behind it has been exported across the world. And it's become one of the leading case studies in the most mature
14:20
mobile money market, with 17 million Kenyans out of a possible 40 using this service and transacting and doing business with it. Now, if we take an example, I have a friend, he's an artist. His name is Cyrus, and he doesn't like to call them glasses or sunglasses,
14:41
but he makes pieces of art that you wear over your eyes, if you like. And he uses scrap metal and a whole host of different materials. Now, he relies on people who are in what's called the juakali sector. Juakali meaning hot sun in Swahili.
15:01
And what this is, it's the informal sector in Kenya, employing about 8 million people. Now, they typically work under the sun, wrought iron, metal, woodwork, and it's a very hard sector of the economy to place because of how high and formal and unregulated it is.
15:23
And yet the way they use, the way supply and demand works in that sector, takes Cyrus' friend, the gentleman who helps him with these different pieces of metal and how he really finds what he turns into art, his name is Ezekiel. Now, Ezekiel, for him to get his work, he goes into a certain market.
15:44
And he has to go there physically, select a number of things, arrange for delivery, and then go back and wait for his materials to arrive for him to work on them. Now, with Mpesa, how that's changed his workflow is through him being able now,
16:01
through just his phone, sending as little as 10 US cents, if you like, to as much as well over 1,000 euros or $1,400, to any one of these suppliers and coordinating the supply and delivery. So what was previously just the cost of doing business,
16:23
he does not have to leave any physical space to conduct business in quite the way anyone with a bank account, anyone with a cheque book would be able to. It doesn't sound like much, but that's partly what's going to drive the next half a million jobs that are created in the informal sector every year.
16:41
Now, majority of artisans, majority of people in Kenya, have been classified as the unbanked for a long time, and this speaks to a lot of people in Africa as well. No access to financial services, and yet something like Mpesa breaks this down to the point where regardless of the phone you have, regardless of the bit of technology you have,
17:01
as long as it can send an SMS both ways, you have access to this. Now, all those stories don't mean anything until you get a sense of how Kenyans are using this. This past December, for example, in just the 30 days of December, Kenyans sent amongst themselves over 1 billion euros in these person-to-person transfers.
17:22
30 days, 1 billion euros, all right? For a third-world country and 15 million-odd people, that's not too bad. And 60% of that is amongst each other, while the other 40% is to businesses, showing that for a market like this, that's unlocked a whole new segment and created, if you like, disrupted banking and finance as we know it.
17:46
Now, that technology has been exported to a whole range of countries. Afghanistan, Haiti right now, some of the big examples. The US, in some cases Barclays, just opened up something I believe a few weeks ago in the UK,
18:03
an app called Pingit, allowing people to exchange goods and services through this app that mirrors M-Pesa and how M-Pesa works. And so what began as simply an experiment to get people to save, to get people to transact money amongst themselves, has really been exported to a whole new level where people are now able to transact
18:22
and rethink the entire level of financial services as they knew it. In Afghanistan, one of the most interesting examples, the police force, all across the country would be paid using cash. And so you have middlemen, and because they have dispersed across the country,
18:43
you have challenges like the Taliban. It was a very sensitive way to get money to them. And so they were one of the first cases to implement M-Pesa. All of these policemen have mobile phones, and so it's possible to actually get direct access to them, even though they'll never have access to any sort of bank or financial services.
19:02
Now, one of the interesting things they found out of this was that, as they began to send M-Pesa to each one of these police officers now, they found on the payroll that 10% of the entire payroll were ghost workers. All right? And so this money had just been going as cash and disappearing along the way, and yet they never knew it.
19:21
And so every one of these police officers afterwards gets a mysterious pay rise when they actually correct everything. And now you have more motivated people who are being paid almost better than the Taliban, wondering, you know, how this could really have happened. And what that speaks to is the amount that you're able to communicate through M-Pesa is simple.
19:42
It's just one-to-one. And all these people needed to do by cutting out the middleman was now go up to someone and withdraw, right? And that's, I think, one of the best examples so far of M-Pesa really starting out Kenyan, and going global after that. So one large payment innovation doesn't mean much for an entire continent unless you look deeper,
20:06
unless you look for more stories, unless you look for more evidence behind the fact that Africa is actually exporting global technology. One specific way, and this needs no reminder to Republicans, there was someone here who elaborately shared this story last year, and that was Patrick Meyer.
20:25
What he was able to do alongside a group of bloggers and technologists across the world of Kenyan origin, and some from different parts of the world who were connected to Kenya. In 2007, 2008, Kenya held what is today a disputed or contested election.
20:44
And as a result of that, the country got into some unrest, you could say. And out of this started in what was just a blog post from someone asking, how are we going to know what's going on? You can't be playing The Sound of Music when people in town are rioting and chanting,
21:02
and so much unrest is going on, and the media won't show it. So Ushahidi was a response to that. And Ushahidi has, in the space of five years now, five, six years, has become one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world, according to MIT's Tech Review,
21:21
and one of the five most innovative companies in media, according to Fast Company. Now, all they do, all this was, and all that they improved on, was if people have no access to technology and people have messages they wish to send, it could be Twitter, it could be SMS, it could be email, whatever means and whatever access you have,
21:42
if you have a message you'd like to send, how can we gather everybody's message, visualize it, and make decisions upon that? And this is actually the very first shady map, but now, I mean, from the Haiti earthquake to Sonoma Geddon in the US, to almost every single major crisis in the world,
22:02
where people had a large amount of information they needed to make critical decisions, Ushahidi has actually played the role of coming through and visualizing and helping them make sense of that data. And this is one example of a company that's focused not only on using just technology, but web technology to influence the way the world operates
22:21
and shift the way we consume and make decisions on information. And so last year, they began a number of ambitious projects, and two of them, Swift-Driven Crowdmap, were touched on just slightly, but speak to a very, very critical part of where the web is headed.
22:42
And this is all being shaped, this entire debate, this thinking is being shaped out of this technology company, this not-for-profit free and open source technology company in Nairobi. Swift-Driven, for anyone here, I bet if you've been trying to keep up with a stream of tweets at the event, it's been a bit difficult, you could say,
23:01
to capture everything with tweets. And that speaks to just our experience of the web, or where at least that's going. The web is like drinking from a fire hose. And to make sense of every RSS feed and every blog you ever subscribe to, every Twitter personality you follow, every email you receive, and if you like, every SMS, would take you a while, to say the least.
23:22
And a lot of us are caught in that attention span crisis of sorts. Now, from this, Ushahidi, based on the experience of mapping out crises where people are SMSing for help, for resources and needs, have taken to the web as their next challenge with Swift-Driven. And what this is aiming to do is to take that entire challenge
23:43
and represent it in a new light, using algorithms and the like, to distil and create a custom-curated feed for you. And, I mean, the beta's out now. It might be private by the time I end this talk, but it's definitely something I'd say to pay attention to,
24:02
especially over the coming months and years. CrowdMap, on the other hand, is a plug-and-play example of Ushahidi. Ushahidi is technical. It can be tricky to implement. And yet, with CrowdMap, in the same time it will take me to finish this talk, any one of you could have mapped out Republica and how many people are here
24:21
and what they're interested in. And if you got everyone in the room to participate, you could have a pretty interesting map. That's the kind of level of data, and especially big data, with what they're working with, that's being shaped on the global stage thanks to their minds and what they're doing. Now, this is a pretty brief screen grab
24:42
of the platform, which is a bit hard to come by, if you ask, but I'm sure, like they said, it's private beta and it might be changing, but everything you can imagine regarding big data and where the web is headed in general, they're on the cusp of and they're innovating around. Now, their office and the hub where they operate from,
25:04
in Nairobi, the iHub, a place where I've spent quite a bit of time myself, is also at a much smaller level, less than M-Pesa. When M-Pesa creates this sort of fertile ground for disruption, what is the outcome? What do people respond with? One example is the iHub, a physical space in Nairobi
25:23
that houses about 7,000 of Kenya's most creative people in technology, in business, early-stage financing, design, you name it, there's a lot of brilliant people there. And this space, this hub, has brought together the entire city
25:40
and given it a nexus point on which to innovate, to test, to try out new and innovative apps and so on, and really to create not only for the Kenyan market, but for any market that has access to this kind of financial services like M-Pesa or to the mobile web like the rest of the continent.
26:02
Now, if you look at the rest of Africa, you might be wondering, there's not much going on outside of Kenya. But you would be wrong if you said that. Now, some of the apps that are being made in places like the iHub and the M-Lab, there's two of them, are really remarkable in how they've been able to scale
26:24
and how low-tech they seem to be, at least from the outset. I'll pick a couple to share with you. iCow, I don't know how many farmers we have in the room, and this caught me by surprise, but one of the most critical things about livestock farming,
26:40
specifically dairy, is knowing when your cow is pregnant. Now, it doesn't sound like much, but for a country which, you know, part of its breadbasket, part of one of the real growth earners for the country's agriculture, this is incredibly useful information. And to any farmer, small-scale farmer, mid-sized, to understand the entire gestation period of your cow,
27:02
it's about nine months, is phenomenal. And what iCow did is, using a simple SMS solution, or at least simple from the outset, it gives a farmer the ability not to use some sort of paper contraption to figure out and fill in and find their cow cycle, but to fill in a set of parameters
27:21
about this bit of livestock. And on average, if you look at each one of the cows, they give, I think it's 1.5 to three litres more. On average, as a result of this bit of technology. And that's not saying much, but that has the potential to transform not only the African continent as it continues to succeed,
27:41
but other emerging markets where agriculture and livestock and farming continues to be important. Koppo Koppo are connecting mobile money to the world. And in more ways than one, what they're doing is changing the way we think of mobile money. I've been sending mobile money to my cab guy,
28:00
the Pizza Hut, if you like, or a version of Pizza Hut or a pizza chain, and all sorts of different businesses. And yet, I pay on time. I'm able to transact with all these large, large businesses, pay my water, pay utilities, and so on. But there's no way of these businesses acting on me as a person.
28:21
To me, I'm just a payment that walked in and picked up a receipt. And what they're doing is they're casting the net out wide and allowing any small business to actually tap in and begin to act on the information that all these people seem to give. I give my mobile phone number so they can contact me and market to me.
28:40
I also give my ID number so they can validate me in any other information about me and create a database. And more importantly, what it allows them to do is create a credit rating system for this entire mass of people sending, as you heard, billions of euros a month, or month on month, amongst themselves and to businesses,
29:02
and allow them to act on that and actually build and innovate on top of this brand new layer in mobile money. Lastly, MFA, agriculture again. But for small-scale farmers across the country, this would seem like not the best place for disruption.
29:22
None of these are apps, except CopaCopa, but these are there to operate exclusively on SMS. And what M-Form does is it allows farmers, geographically spread out, to collectively negotiate and buy goods and supplies. It sounds like a problem which should be solved already. And yet with a mobile phone,
29:40
what you're guaranteed of is a one-to-one ratio, and more importantly, a very personal way to contact each and every one of these people who cumulatively shape a lot of African economies. So in the 13 countries, in 13 countries across the continent,
30:00
you find a total of 35 hubs. Each one of these hubs is focused exclusively on technology, amongst a range of other aspects. And what they're doing is mapping out, be it at a college level, at an academia level, or higher up, just seeking to disrupt the market. They're looking at applications, technology,
30:22
and building to create some of the examples, and hopefully better, for their respective countries, showing that it's not exclusive to Kenya or East Africa, but it's something that's spreading, and it's something which, if this is all you've seen in a matter of months out of one country, what can you expect to see out of 35, out of 13?
30:41
Now, one example out of West Africa, which really, really caught my eye, has been M-Pedigree. Now, counterfeiters have a great advantage, it seems, outwitting the authorities and creating,
31:01
be it counterfeit goods, or in this particular case, counterfeit medicines. Now, every year, the counterfeit industry in general accounts for $690 billion worth, and specifically for drugs and pharmaceuticals,
31:20
it's $800 billion. In Africa, $100 billion. So you've got this large, large amount of fake medicineals, which either contain traces or no dosage whatsoever. And the largest part affected by this is West Africa.
31:40
Now, what M-Pedigree do is developed by a gentleman by the name of Brett Simmons, is they have sought to tackle this problem head-on. And one of the most innovative ways to do it would be through the mobile phone, again. It's ubiquitous. You've got, in some countries like South Africa, you've got more active SIM cards than the total population of the country. And so what this tells you is that
32:01
if there's one way to reach people, there's one layer, if you can successfully innovate on and scale, it's mobile. Now, what they've been able to do is for every bit of medicine you get, you're able to see a code. And in seconds, you SMS that code to a short four-digit number,
32:20
and you get a response to whether that piece of medicine that you've bought is actually legitimate. And this, in the process, in the almost half dozen countries it's spread out to, just from an experiment, just from a proof of concept in Ghana, what this has shown is that it's doing better than just meeting the counterfeiters halfway. It's completely undercutting them
32:40
and challenging Africans to ask and demand for goods that actually are legitimate, saving millions of dollars in the process. Now, we've talked quite a bit about scale, and I think it would be unfair to discuss all of this without talking about what is arguably one of the continent's biggest social or social media-related successes.
33:03
Now, Mixit is a social network founded in Cape Town in South Africa in Stellenbosch, and they continue to be a shining light for what's possible for the African market, social network that started as an instant messenger client for feature phones, if you like.
33:21
And now, whether it's your iPhone, whether it's a Blackberry, Windows Phone, it's probably up next, they are completely spread out, and this is the number one social network in Africa by numbers, 10 million users, most of them are active users, and 40 million users across the world.
33:40
Large number of users in Indonesia, large number in Mexico as well, and some, I believe, also in Europe as well, Eastern Europe. Now, Mixit is a story which many people have built off of and innovated around, specifically in South Africa, where the number of users on Mixit
34:02
outnumber the ones on Facebook. That's set to change, especially across the continent. So given what we saw of the Facebook map, if they were to do that in present day, it would look a lot different than what it did at that time. Now, one example of scale in Africa has to be an app that was built on to Mixit
34:21
just two months ago. App is called JudgeMe, nothing original, similar to Hot or Not, one of those early internet web startups from the West. Now, in the space of two months, on Mixit, with this sandbox of 40 million people across the world,
34:43
they got one million subscribers and over 100 million page views. Now, that's not saying much in this part of the world, but you show me something else that's gotten a million Africans using that service, and now you're actually talking. And one of the best ways to unlock that
35:02
is typically to target feature phones and to target that level of the market and disrupt it. So these stories aren't one-offs. They're only the beginning, I could say, and if those hubs are anything to go by and the number of apps coming out of each and every one of those hubs speaks to a greater idea,
35:22
and that's that Africa isn't the hopeless continent, that Africa's walls aren't the only side of the coin to it, then really we've got to examine and see that Africa is really rising, and the question is whether you'll rise with it. As one example, the most interesting one
35:42
that came across, and anybody here on Twitter might find this quite interesting. I know I did. There's a gentleman, he used to be a teacher, lives out in the Kenyan village, and came across Twitter one day.
36:01
Saw it, loved the service, and in Kenya we have a couple services by Twitter themselves and by Facebook that allow you just to send and receive via text. With Twitter, you do not have to be signed up on Twitter to receive updates from someone. Now Chief Karioki is the man I'm talking about, and what he was able to do is in a constituency,
36:23
in a district that electricity is not even guaranteed, let alone with every one of his constituents, he's been able to get an audience of just over 20,000 through his tweets. So he has a feature phone, and all he does, just to explain it,
36:40
is he writes these updates and informs the local people who've subscribed to his tweets. He has what are called barazas, which is a gathering of people, and every month he holds two, and at each one of these two gatherings, he asks each one of the locals, whoever has a smartphone, sorry, not a smartphone, any phone, he tells them to send one text message.
37:01
And this one text message subscribes them to receive every update for free on their part. The network provider pays for this. And so what he's been able to get in with this has been an entirely new group of people speaking with him. He talks about, I think he's foiled a robbery
37:23
not too long ago by just texting and saying, so and so, there's thieves in this gentleman's house, we should do something. And then the entire village pretty much surrounded this house and were waiting to exact some measure of justice on this guy. But better still, I think what each one
37:41
of these stories tell too is that scale, not only in Africa but the rest of the world, is something we've almost forgotten, something we think is lost in a world of WhatsApp and a lot of these other instant messaging tools and that's SMS. Building and starting from there and in some cases with voice, places where illiteracy is a big challenge.
38:04
Starting with SMS can actually unlock not only just the next million or the next 20,000 like for chief karaoke, but possibly the next billion across all the emerging markets. Now Africa's weathered the financial storm of the global economic crisis
38:22
and it's set to become, at least a lot of these hubs, as I mentioned, are set to become regional contenders. The 10 fastest growing economies of the next years are all African countries. And according to the World Bank economies, 45% of Kenya's,
38:41
because Kenya's debt level is around 45% of its debt, if Kenya was in Europe, it would be a top contender over the next 10 years. And what this tells you is that as you're thinking, as you're creating, as you're tweeting, as you're investing in the next level of business on this side of the globe, you cannot forget the Southern Hemisphere and more importantly, you cannot forget Africa.
39:02
Thank you so much Republica.
39:35
Excellent, thank you so much. That was just perfect for my eyes.
39:40
Like I said in the intro, I was really trying to bring in people to tell this African story and we're really happy to have Patrick here to talk about Ushahiri, but this full picture and just really telling people what's happening, I think you did a perfect job of that. Thank you so much. Now you've also did a perfect job of timing, so we have about 15 minutes left for question and answers.
40:02
So please, if there are questions for Mark, let's see you up, put your hands in the air. There's a gentleman in the back, please. So it's tricky getting that first question, phew. I have zillions, but I'll let the others go first.
40:24
Can you give us an update on the idea of the $80 smartphone? How many users are there currently? Right, so what he's asking about is the idea of smartphone and how many users. So the Safaricom CEO at a gathering in January
40:44
mentioned 300,000, but there's other estimates that would say that it's significantly higher than that. So that 300,000 is on the lower part, but yeah, that's 300,000 Androids
41:01
that went there eight, nine months ago. Claudia, in the middle. Thank you very much for your presentation. That was really wonderful.
41:21
I really liked it. I have two specific questions. The questions, one is about the user numbers for the agricultural apps. Wasn't really apps, is it? Services, they had iCOW and the other one, F-Farm, I think. Do you have any idea to what extent
41:42
farmers are willing to use these tools in terms of numbers? And the second question is, your examples were very much concerned with service delivery, sending money and improving services in this respect. I would like to know how do you see the potential
42:04
for using technology in governance issues? We talk a lot here at Republika about participation, accountability and these things. And I think even in Germany, most citizens are not really inclined to use technology and participate. But I know that in the aid business,
42:22
a lot of people get very hyped about this and think, oh, this is the way to go and we need to use this technology to involve citizens. So I would like to hear your view on this. Sure. Thank you. If you don't mind, I'll answer the last question first. So this is possibly another big hallmark for Kenya
42:42
and that was that last year, Kenya became, I believe it's the second country in Africa and the first in Sub-Saharan Africa to open up all government data. So what this has allowed is myself right now, if I was to get a computer or any one of people
43:01
who are interested in taking deep dives into data and making visualizations or helping people understand what that data has. The Kenyan government has actually been digitizing a lot of this information and there's apps and tools now that allow for me, for example, to find each constituency in the country
43:23
is allocated a fund. So I can actually walk through the expenses of this fund like never before. No one had the power to do this. No one would want to go through the trouble of even finding this kind of information. And now with a half decent connection to the internet, I can access that and I can actually call up somebody,
43:42
meet a local counselor, begin to ask questions, begin to interrogate what I'm seeing and that has been something which we've begun to see a whole range of different applications, tools and services built on that, not only from Kenya. And so I challenge anybody here, to be honest, to give that a look and see what they can do
44:02
there as well. Regarding your first question, I believe for iCOW, I'm not entirely certain, but I think there's definitely more than 500 of these farmers. And then why I think it's important,
44:24
it's quite a big learning curve, all right? So even there's some research that came out this week that said, you know, farmers actually prefer to call over to text, long bit of research because a lot of assumptions are now being made in agriculture, oh, well, we'll just build this for them.
44:41
And now research like that is better informing not only Kenya's position, but hopefully other African countries as well. Great, we've had three more questions. In the meantime, I think we have space for four in total. If you keep questions and answers short, it's you first, please. Just a short question. Last year, I had a similar talk of Jessica Colassau.
45:01
And I just wanted to know if you are connected to her in a way, like in the iHub project or something like that, if you know each other or if you're working together. Yeah, so one of the startups that I'm involved with is a technology blog. And so we do a lot around innovation, startups, African tech.
45:21
And so we're collaborating with, yeah, with the iHub, working out of there and also with iHub Research, which is the research division of the iHub. So yes, yeah, we've been friends for years, yeah. Thank you for your interesting talk. I actually have a question about the use of mobile phones
45:40
in terms of like I read a very beautiful story that farmers in the countryside and the Boonies actually use phones for comparing the prices they will get for the harvest in different cities. So it did change the way that harvests were like marketed a lot and they obtained a lot higher prices.
46:01
Now, our smartphones also use family wise rather, or group wise. Is it like, I don't know, larger groups that use one phone or is it personal belonging like we use it? I think it's a different way how the tools are used, isn't it? Sure, I'd say definitely on all phones in general,
46:21
typically someone, you know, the question of multiple SIM cards always arises. So people will have more than one SIM card to more than one different provider. And the phone is a very personal device. And yet, you know, it's shared like in the example of Chief Karyoki, what he said is that even if each home
46:40
only had one person with one SIM card, there's three or four people who will use that phone. Someone will send a text message or one actual innovation that was, you know, made for Africa, if you like, is what's called a please call me message. If I don't have airtime and 96% of the continent is prepaid,
47:01
and so airtime runs out and I want to reach you, I can send you a free message that has an advert that's paid for by the telecommunications company that tells you to call me. And sometimes in some countries you send, you know, maybe someone wants to know whether to bring bread home or not. So I'll send you two and two is yes and one is no. So there's all sorts of different ways
47:20
that they've built around that. But to answer your question, with smartphones in particular, they become a lot more personal. You know, people have invested significantly in this. And so it is more personal. But with all phones, I mean, if someone was to ask me, Mark, can I put my SIM card in your phone? I wouldn't think twice, I'd hand it to it. So there's a general level of,
47:43
it's accepted that you can ask me that. And you know, then it's more of a personal call. Okay, two last questions. Jens, please. And then the lady in the back. Just in the social media, like Twitter is creating also a different layer of publicness of news.
48:00
Sometimes you look on Twitter and then the eight o'clock news, you think, what are they talking about? I'm know something totally different from my Twitter stream. And I was following the Occupy Nigeria movement and I intensively and I followed a lot of the demonstrators, of the young demonstrators, listening to the street, to the clashes, to what's going on.
48:21
And also Nigerian intellectuals who took over the chance to say it's not North against South, it's not Christians against Islam. It's another problem. So how do you think about the change of publicness of different layers of reality, which are transported between the people?
48:41
Is there, do you see there any impact, like for example, if you maybe also know Occupy Nigeria as one example? Well, obviously last year, North Africa spoke for itself. And it went, it got to the point that, you know, they took action to the extent that this number of dictators were out of power.
49:05
One interesting idea that I've been thinking about that I'm looking to write a piece about is that if you look at the 60s and 70s, when Africa had, between the 1960 and 1970, Africa had dozens of coup d'etats. But in, and that was acceptable somewhat to the world.
49:22
The world was somehow all right with it. If you look in present day, the coup d'etats frowned upon, you know, and you know, people have outcries against it. But a social media upheaval is different. And so maybe that's the new coup d'etat in present day. But specifically with Twitter, what my opinion of that is that's really opened up,
49:45
like you said, a new level of debate. And examples in Kenya, this is a political year, and almost no politician can afford not to be on Twitter, not to go that level of scrutiny from people. The diaspora, obviously Africans abroad a lot of them connected, and then you have Africans in the country.
50:01
So you get this balance of debate coming in and also debate being started locally and regionally. So I'd say you have different levels of society now getting acquainted. There's companies who are saying, you know, we'll only serve you or solve your problem if you tweet us, or we'll solve it faster if you tweet us.
50:20
And that's a Kenyan company, right? It's a Kenyan telecommunications provider. And so there's all these different ways that they're trying to get people to adopt technology. And in the end, I'd say it's definitely giving us a new spin. As far as politics is concerned, wait and see. This is, again, an election year
50:41
for a number of countries in Africa. And I think it's only a matter of time. Lady in the back, please, for the final question. Yeah, so you mentioned the 2,600 languages in Africa, but it seems like a lot of the examples you gave are from Anglophone, English-speaking Africa. And I'm just curious to know what links are being made.
51:00
I'm asking on behalf of some Mozambican friends who are geeks and journalists. What links can be made between French-speaking Africa, Portuguese-speaking Africa, and some of what you've talked about? Thanks. Right, so I think for Lusophone Africa,
51:20
I think in Mozambique, in a lot of African countries, I'd say, people are trying their best to replicate Kenya's success. Kenya's a unique case in many ways, but that doesn't stop them from trying to see if a lot of this will export and work in quite the same way.
51:41
Now, a lot of what I've said, to be honest, applies to many of the Anglophone countries. But I think the best way to determine what applies and what doesn't, actually falls back to the question of the leadership of the country. And so for the ones that are democratic
52:02
or autocratic but stable, that typically will determine the level to which technology can actually change the country. Ethiopia is a good example, economically doing fantastic. But in terms of technology, because everything is so government-led,
52:22
you find that it hasn't picked up in quite the way it could have if there was competition. So I'd say for Francophone Africa, for Lusophone Africa, it comes down to, and possibly all of them, it actually comes down to the leadership, to what has a direct effect on adoption of technology and innovation.
52:45
Okay. If that's all. That's it. All right, thank you very much. Thank you so much, it's so much. Please give it up for Mark.