Contributors A-Z | Top contributors | Edit profile

Erik Hersman: In Kenya

I grew up in Kenya and Sudan. I’m one of those guys who’s much more “at home” in Africa, and I currently live in Kenya. I’m happily married and have 3 beautiful little girls that keep me on my toes. I write two main blogs: White African is my personal blog where I write about high-tech mobile and web technology change in Africa. AfriGadget is a team blog I started a couple years ago, where we talk about low-tech ingenuity and microentrepreneurs in Africa.

RECENT POSTS

• What tech businesses need to survive in a time of flux

  The theme of the 2012 Skoll World Forum is "Flux: seizing momentum, driving change", which I think is a fantastic one. We’ve never had such upheaval in the way businesses work, in how citizens interact with government, or in how information flows in the world. It’s about change, and survival in a time of flux is best done through agility and creativity."As an operating paradigm, it expresses the fluid nature of relationships, policies, institutions and human beings which are ever-changing ...

• 4 Factors shaping social impact investment in Africa’s tech scene

  I recently took part in a panel discussion focused on “investing in tech in Africa”. It was a good session, as it was very much a discussion between the audience and ourselves.There were a number of points that came up illustrating both the current difficulties and future opportunities when it comes to investing in the African tech space.Using what's thereThere are a number of tech hubs and labs coming up across the continent, and each have a different ...

• Want to kill the status quo? Innovate

  I was recently asked, “how do you find innovators?” It’s an odd question really, one that I hadn’t thought about before, but one that is valuable to think through. You have to dig deeper and think why innovations happen at all, and what the power structures are that make them be identified as innovative. After all, innovation is just a new way of doing things than what is currently the norm.In any industry, society or business there are status quo ...

• Fabrication and manufacturing: The future of African hardware innovation

  Across Africa there is a vibrant culture of people creating things. Hardware products. It’s rarely glamorous as our inventors and micro-entrepreneurs innovate on products due to necessity -- there simply aren’t enough jobs and they need to feed their families.Regardless of the reasons why they do it, what this has created is a culture of innovation.When you have a problem in Africa, there isn’t another option, you either improvise, adapt and overcome, or you die. You don’t give up, you ...

• Why Mpesa is still a financial disruptor

  Farhad Manjoo makes a compelling argument for why the real winners of the payments revolution are the same players we already know, the credit card companies and the banks, in in an article entitled "Don’t mess with credit: Why the future of payments is already in your pocket."“Nearly every start-up working in payments is simply creating a new front end for your credit card. That’s not a small thing; we need new ways to use our credit cards. But we ...

• Why 2012 could be the year of the African startup

  The past few years have been about building an infrastructure that improves the chances of the technology startups in Africa to succeed. Seeing this buildout in action in 2011 was exciting, but it should be recognised for what it really was: a setup for 2012 and beyond.You see, all those labs and hubs around the continent, the startups and the media coverage? They’re all about getting attention and increasing the awareness of the pent-up startup potential in Africa’s technology space. ...

• Africa’s mobile operators need to be more disruptive

  Generally speaking, in the 90s, Africa's mobile network operators (MNOs) were highly disruptive. In this last decade however, they have continued to decrease in this.Operators are no longer the offensive, attacking force of yesteryear, instead they’re putting up barriers and defensive walls trying to protect what they have and hide.Instead, the disruption comes from the open web. Whenever the operators put up a blocker to what users want, usually in the form of price or access to their infrastructure, ...

• The subtle condescension of ‘ICT for development’

  I have cognitive dissonance over the term "Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D)". This term, “ICT4D,” is confusing, hypocritical, and has a whiff of condescension that makes me cringe.As I understand it, it’s what NGOs do in places like Africa and Asia, but if the same things are done in poor communities in the US or Europe, it's not called ICT4D, it’s called "civil society innovation" or a "disruptive product".I'll be the first to say that I think more ...

• The mobile phones landscape in Uganda [infographic]

  The iHub Research team has been at work pulling together mobile phone stats for Uganda and collating them into an infographic.It’s good to see the 41% density of mobile phones and impressive numbers starting to show up from the 1-million users of Uganda's MTN (60% market share) Mobile Money solution.As iHub writes explaining who they are, "iHub Research shares stories about the vibrant East African technology community by conducting ICT research on technology innovation within the community," and as ...

• Africa: Turning the tech world upside down (Part 2)

  In the first part of this article I discussed -- picking up from talks I gave at PopTech and Nokia World 2011 -- "The Idea of Africa" and how Western abstractions of the continent are often mired in the past, and, with examples, how Africa was turning the world upside down because disruptive ideas happen at the edge.Now, I want to look at the Two Big Trends.Trend #1: Adoption by Africans as consumers is increasing Trend #2: Technology costs are decreasingAt ...

• Read more articles... »