Why Is IBM Making All These Investments In Africa?

Written by Kevin Mwanza

Jun 10, 2014

IBM has a new R&D lab in Kenya and offices in Angola, Mauritius, Tanzania, Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria. Why all the investment? Global Business Services chief Bridget van Kralingen explains.

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On Africa

We really have strong long-term growth in Africa. So we announced earlier this year a $100 million investment to bring Watson to Africa. And we will basically put the very first instance of Watson in our Kenya lab. We call it Project Lucy, and we will start bringing cognitive systems to Africa. So that’s a big thing. We actually already have 12 research labs in the world. We announced one in Africa early this year as well, our Kenya lab. So that’s the only one in Africa. And obviously 12 is a very small number, so for us that’s a very important strategic investment. We are focused in that research lab on what we call the grand challenges of the African continent. We’re trying to really mine data to help find solutions to energy, water, transportation, agriculture, and health care issues in Africa. That’s a very important investment for us.

We also made all our software available to African users free of charge. They can experiment and build on it and play with it. And the reason we did that is partly to help build skills, and partly to get people in Africa aware and comfortable with IBM software. So that donation obviously has a long-term impact in building skills on our software, but it’s a very, very key one.

And then over the last couple of years we’ve set up offices in Angola, Mauritius, Tanzania, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. And then we added as well as those another 17 countries as part of a network to provide one of the continent’s leading telco leaders with IT services that it gives at the present in 17 other countries around those.

And then we really focus on I think some very interesting areas in Africa. So we did—actually I ended up chairing IBM’s work on microfinance. We did some work with the Grameen Foundation, a lot of pro bono work. And that’s led to us doing a lot of work around banking and mobile payments around Africa, cloud solutions. We work with a number of the mobile providers on mobile payments and help expand mobile-based services.