fbpx

Opinion: Silicon Savannah Is Changing The Global Face Of Technology

Opinion: Silicon Savannah Is Changing The Global Face Of Technology

From Tech.Mic. Story by Jack Smith.

Every week, the American tech sector uses the most advanced mobile technologies in the world to create some new meaningless distraction — Tinder for dogs, Airbnb for boats, Yo — all sorts of luxury convenience tools created to manufacture and solve problems that don’t exist and extract some in-app purchases along the way.

Meanwhile, in Africa, a budding generation of technologists, coders and entrepreneurs are rising to solve their continent’s most pressing problems. Entire new industries around payment solutions, crowdsourcing and entertainment media are springing up in tech hubs in Kenya, Nigeria and other countries.

This is the rise of Silicon Savannah — and a few ways it’s going to change the global face of technology.

1. Africans are more mobile, and mobile is the future.

Every few months, the mobile web — the Internet on your phone, as opposed to your laptop — eats away at another corner of the Internet. Gaming, payments, social media, search, communication and everything else you can think of is giving way to the supercomputers in our pocket. People are meeting the loves of their lives, running businesses, writing their memoirs on their phones.

Two-thirds of all homes in Sub-Saharan Africa own at least one mobile phone, according to a Gallup poll.

“In a few short years, the proliferation of mobile phone networks has transformed communications in sub-Saharan Africa,” the Pew Research Center reports. “It has also allowed Africans to skip the landline stage of development and jump right to the digital age.”

Essentially, Africa leaped over the PC era and landed directly in the mobile revolution.

In fact, most of the rest of the world is way ahead of the U.S. in terms of mobile. China is the largest cellphone market in the world, with 1.25 billion mobile phone subscribers, many of whom are mobile exclusive. And these countries have a major leg up when it comes to developing mobile solutions.

2. Which is why they’re better at paying with their phones.

In the U.S., every app is trying to become some kind of mobile PayPal. Facebook messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest — not to mention apps explicitly for payment, like Apple Pay. But nobody is really using them — at least not compared to Kenyans.

In Kenya, an app called M-Pesa allows people to store money on mobile accounts and make simple transfers via SMS messaging — you don’t even need a smartphone to use it. Multiple sources in the venture capital investment community have told Mic that many Africans are simply stunned the U.S.s doesn’t have something similar.

The rise of M-PESA is largely due the dominance of mobile on the continent, yes, but also to the dangerous and insecure ways money was moving before they had access to mobile payments. According to the Next Africa, about 85 percent of Africans were carrying money in bags and asking bus couriers to transport money for them 10 years ago. As the Economist points out:

Cash can thus be sent one place to another more quickly, safely and easily than taking bundles of money in person, or asking others to carry it for you. This is particularly useful in a country where many workers in cities send money back home to their families in rural villages. Electronic transfers save people time, freeing them to do other, more productive things instead.

Because of M-PESA, Kenya is the leading e-commerce capital of the world. This one app moves a third of the Kenyan GDP among its 15 million, mostly rural, users.

3. Africa will never be cord-cutters because there’s no cord to cut.

In the U.S., we’ll probably spending the next few decades watching the aged titans of the media industry, such as Time Warner, Paramount and Disney, fight against the tide of Internet services like Netflix and Amazon. After all, we have businesses like cable, publishing and network TV that won’t go down without spending the fortunes they amassed in the 20th century to battle against the 21st century.

Not in Africa. Africa doesn’t have a robust broadband infrastructure, or continent-wide digital-rights laws and copyright regulations, so new startups like iROKOtv can rapidly become the Netflix of Africa, bringing Nollywood movies and shows to the continent.

There are dozens of examples just like this — industries where Africa can develop robust tech solutions to local problems like entertainment delivery and payments without having to fight back a monolithic incumbency.

Read more at Tech.Mic.