Africa: Turning the tech world upside down (Part 1)

In business white space is defined as a place, “…where rules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets are non existent, and strategy is unclear…” It’s the space between the organisational chart, where the real innovation happens.

It’s also a great definition for what we see in Africa, and it’s one reason why it’s one of the most exciting places to be a technology entrepreneur today.

Recently, I gave with a talk at PopTech where I talked about “The Idea of Africa” and how Western abstractions of the continent are often mired in the past. It’s not just safaris and athletes, poverty and corruption — it’s more nuanced than that.

I was also in London for Nokia World 2011 speaking on a panel about “The next billion” and how it might/might not turn the world upside down. In my comments I probably be echoed many of the same thoughts that came out at PopTech.

Here are a few of the points:

Horizontal vs Vertical scaling
I talk a lot about this with my friend Ken Banks, where we look to scale our own products in a less traditional format. As entrepreneurs you’re driven to scale, but our definition of scale in the West tends to be monolithic. Creating verticals that are incredibly efficient, but which decreases resilience.

In places like Africa, we have this idea of horizontal scaling, where the product or service is grown in smaller units, but spread over multiple populations and communities. Where a smaller size has its own benefits.

In this time of corporate and government cuts, where seemingly oversized companies are propped up in order to not fail, there are some lessons here for the West. We shouldn’t be surprised that the solutions to the West’s problems will increasingly come from places like Africa.

Instead of thinking of Africa as a place that needs to be more like the West, we’re now looking at Africa and realising the West need to be more like Africa.

Reverse distribution
Will we increasingly see a new set of innovative ideas, products and services coming from places like Africa and spreading to the rest of the world? Why is Africa such a fertile ground for a different type of innovation, a more practical one — or is it?

Disruptive ideas happen at the edge.

Africa is on the edge. While the world talks at great length about the shifting of power from the West (US/Europe) to the East (India/China), Africa is overlooked. That works in our favour (sometimes).

A couple of the ideas and products that started in Africa and been exported beyond the continent include Mpesa, Ushahidi and MXit.

In this time of corporate and government cuts, where seemingly oversized companies are propped up in order to not fail, there are some lessons here for the West. We shouldn’t be surprised that the solutions to the West’s problems will increasingly come from places like Africa.

Instead of thinking of Africa as a place that needs to be more like the West, we’re now looking at Africa and realising the West need to be more like Africa.

Mpesa — the idea came from Vodafone, but the product met its success in Kenya. Over US$8-billion has been transferred through its peer-to-peer payment system. Vodafone has failed to make the brand go global, but the model itself is being dissected and mimicked the world over.

Ushahidi — started small, from Kenya again, and driven by its Crowdmap platform now has over 20 000 deployments of its software around the world. It’s in 132 countries, and the biggest uses of it are in places like Japan, Russia, Mexico, and the US.

MXit — the famous mobile chat software from South Africa has three times the number of Facebook users in that country, and has over 25-million users globally.

As we see at Maker Faire Africa, these innovative solutions are based on needs locally, many of them due to budgetary constraints. Some of them due to cultural idiosyncrasies. Often times people from the West can’t imagine (nor create) the solutions needed in emerging markets. They don’t have the context nor is the “mobile first” paradigm understood.

A good example of this is Okoa Jihazi, a way to get a small loan of credit for your mobile phone minutes when you’re out of cash to buy them, from the operator. They’ve built some safeguards in to protect against abuse, such as you must have had the SIM for six months in order to get the service. It works though, because the company selling it (and many of the mobile operators do across Africa) understands the nuanced life of Africa.

We hold on to technology longer, experiment on it, abuse it even. SMS and USSD are great examples of this, while much of the Western world is jumping on the next big technology bandwagon, there are really crazy things coming out in emerging markets, like USSD internet, payment systems, ticketing and more.

Throughout the world, the basic foundation of any technology success is based on finding a problem, a need, and solving it. This is what we’re doing in Africa. We have different use cases and cultures, which means that there will be many solutions. Some will only be valuable for local needs and won’t scale beyond the country or region. Others will go global. Both solutions are “right”. It’s not a failure to have a product that profitably serves 100 000 people instead of 100-million.

Turning the world upside down has as much to do with accepting this idea of localised success as an acceptable answer as it does with explosive global growth and massive vertical scale.

Check in tomorrow for Part 2 of how Africa is turning the world upside down

Image: Eleven Point Pink