Africa: off the tech map? | Hacker News Reader

Africa: off the tech map?

appfrica.net

42 pointsnagoff27 comments

One problem may also be this - the links between African countries is weak. For example, if I have an office in Singapore, I am basically covering all of South East Asian very effectively. I can move people and resources across SE Asia from this office.

If you have an office in Lagos, your reach is limited to Nigeria, Ghana and a few other West African countries. The link between Nigeria and Cameroun is weak, and Nigeria to Congo is a difficult journey. To make a trip from Cameroun to Angola, it is probably cheaper to first fly to Portugal and then back.

Africa is a huge place and there are regional circles. So if you bother to make an office in a particular country, you are not covering the whole of Africa (which, combined, probably comprise a good chunk of customers), you are covering just the regional zone that has relationships with that country, and these are probably a much smaller group of people, making it not worth it to have such an office.

Great point. For historical reasons, many African countries established better links between themselves and their former Colonial rulers than they did between themselves, with inter-country links being neglected.

Immediately after independence this made sense, as those links back to Europe were already well-established and they were to countries with far higher trading capacities than neighbouring African countries, but in the long-run it retarded the growth of African trading regions and the diversification of industry in many parts of the continent.

Some cities are pretty much first world, but 100km out of town you're in the 3rd world. Cellphone coverage over my whole country, I'm typing this on a notebook attached to a 23" LED screen and a docked iPhone. I'm writing C# for the day job while telecommuting from home. My guide up Kilimanjaro friended me on Facebook the other day. But I'll be donating blankets to some very cold people this winter - people who have never typed on a keyboard. Huge differences.

Tell us more! What country are you in? Were you raised there, or did you move there by choice for some reason?

Pretty boring by African standards - born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Lived in various parts of the country, visited Zimbabwe, Tanzania (climbing Kilimanjaro), Mozambique (scuba diving), Lesotho (cycling trip). Taste of the kili trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/richard.watson/Kilimanjaro

South Africa has really transformed, but still a long way to go. I think the really interesting places are those that are emerging now. I've heard Ghana is fantastic - great people, very friendly.

How's the tech scene in South Africa? I would imagine it has its share of startups and investors, etc.

There is some info at http://www.siliconcape.com/ (Cape Town focused).

I've known about it for ages, but assumed it was very CT-focused so only now really dug into the site and registered. It does look like the go-to place for local startupy types, thanks!

Development here is mostly focused around consuming & adding to technology - e.g. CRUD apps, although there is a small population of startups. Cape Town has the Silicon Cape initiative and there are a couple of incubators in other cities, e.g. http://www.theinnovationhub.com/

I have no idea how many developers-in-garages there are. I've watched the Business of Software forum, ASP and a couple others, but haven't sensed many other South Africans (or Africans). There is some interest in the social media area, like Afrigator.com and a few service-oriented companies. During the .com era, there was something called First Tuesday, which mirrored an overseas initiative of the same name. Meetups of ideas/money/services first Tuesday of every month.

In terms of bigger names...hmm. Alon Musk was born here but not sure when he left. Mark Shuttleworth started here. There's a make-a-site-easily company that is doing well but whose name I forget (edit: yola.com), and they're now in California.

Ah - here's an index: http://www.sastartupindex.co.za/

Maybe there's a startup idea in there :) /adds to list

I spent a few weeks last summer in Western Africa, mostly Burkina Faso, but did spend a week in Ghana. I understand it is the most stable in west Africa and growing the fastest but I, as a westerner coming from one of the top 10 or so poorest countries in the world(Burkina), didn't see as dramatic a difference in Ghana than I had expected. I unfortunately never made it to Accra.

Africa's an awfully big place to make generalisations about. Some cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town for instance, are near first world in their sophistication and living standards and have well-established tech industries, quite different from the stereotypical villages without running water, electricity or any tech whatsoever.

Making blanket statements and offering one-size-fits-all solutions for the entire continent are as silly as pretending that the US and Western Europe share the same problems and need the same solutions as the poorest corner of Madagascar. The problems Johannesburg faces and the solutions it needs are closer to that of any major Western city and are light years removed from the problems and solutions of your average rural village.

South Africa more than 2 million Facebook users, its own Google search, YouTube, Maps, Street View (launching Tuesday) domains and services, its own Apple AppStore, its start-up industry is growing and has produced at various points the 3rd largest payment processing software supplier and 2nd largest Certificate Authority and Amazon's EC2 was developed mostly at its Development Centre in Cape Town. I recently did some work for a local team that wrote and maintains pretty much the entire software infrastructure for a large British retailer, a product they're now expanding to other international retailers. Not hugely impressive by most standards, I'll admit, but surely its evidence that Africans are definitely on the tech map. And that's not even taking into account the thriving tech communities in places like Kampala and Nairobi or other tech-related industries in Africa.

Point being, I think some of the people commenting missed the point of the article because of their misconception about what Africa is about.

So yes - the western consumer machine has not penetrated so well.

But that does not mean they are not on the map at all - if you saw any of the recent "Africa" season on BBC 4 in the uk it was clear that mobile phone usage is high, there are big cities (like Lagos) with loads going on, film industry, music industry.

It all seems a bit chaotic to my western eyes but its clearly vibrant and resourceful and there is a huge amount of drive. In the Lagos programs a lot of the people featured had the endless inventiveness and ability to rise to challenges we would all think was fantastic in an entrepreneur.

I suspect that Africa will emerge with its own technology ecosystem - not dissimilar to ours but with an African slant. I also suspect it has probably had enough of the west coming and telling it how and what to do.

> if you saw any of the recent "Africa" season on BBC 4 in the uk

could you pass a long a link for that program? I tried to do a search but nothing relevant came up.

iplayer irritatingly only has stuff on for 6 days after transmission. BBC 4 does repeat their material pretty regularly. It will say on this pages when it does:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s3vdm

(in fact it looks like it was already repeated on BBC 2 from that page but it will come up again).

Would also highly recommend:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/music/features/african-rock.sht...

Fascinating stuff on people like Youssou N'Dour (to pick one of many examples) who have gone back to Africa after western success and are now building Africa labels for African artists.

According to Max Seybold (cherrypal), over the years, there have been lots of "bring technology to Africa" efforts which resulted lots of unused equipment. However, it's starting to get used, especially as locals figure out how to make money from it.

He tells of one guy who makes a living sending e-mail for his village. During the week, said e-mail is entered into his laptop. He then walks to a bigger town, uploads and delivers the new mail, downloads e-mail to folks in his down, and walks back to his town. He then delivers what he downloaded.

It's like sending a telegram in the old days.

This article bugs me a bit, since it seems to be a "Big Tech Hates Africa" article, whereas I think the reality is more "all large companies are spending minimal resources on poorer areas of the world". It certainly does make Africa look a left out on a map, but large areas of Asia are equally not targeted by large companies, but the geo-political layout is different.

While it is odd that so many large tech companies haven't highlighted their presence in Africa, there are some notable omissions from that list. Microsoft, for example, have clearly listed contact points and targeted support pages all over Africa, including Kenya[1], and SAP has a number of operations across Africa[2].

The reason for Google not listing their Kenya office seems to be to do with the type of office it is[3]. They do have quite a few jobs listed in both Kenya, and the author's own city: Kampala in Uganda[4].

Perhaps when the tech industry matures, we'll see the kind of coverage a large manufacturing company has[5].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/phone/contact.aspx?countr... [2] http://www.sap.com/contactsap/countries/index.epx [3] http://whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-goog... [4] http://www.google.com/jobs/africa/ [5] http://toyota-africa.com/cars/new_cars/index.asp

I agree. Overlooking Africa probably has more to do with so many (and cheaper to exploit) opportunities back home than it does with not being interested in Africa.

I hate to be blunt, but why would a company open branch offices in countries that are both poor AND not growth countries when there are so many easier opportunities in e.g. asia, eastern europe or south america? Just a matter of priorities ...

The impression I got by the end of the article is that he says it's up to Africa to make itself relevant to tech companies, certainly not that tech should pay more attention to Africa 'just because'.

Note that there is a Google data center in Uganda. When I was there a few years ago, uplinks back to the US were incredibly slow; however, any time I wanted to hit Google, it was pretty damn fast (considering it was a 64k shared DSL line that served an entire business park).

Africa has bigger problems than not being able to influence the future of the internet.

Perhaps if it was able to influence the future of the internet, some of it's other problems would be solved?

I would argue that Africa actually will influence the future of the internet. Considering there's about 15% of the worlds population there, that's over 1 billion potential customers!

I think there is a boatload of opportunity in Africa.

Though I expect the solutions aren't the same as in the west. I think at least one of the reasons that Google is in several countries is to cover support in many timezones (from talking to them) but the timezones in that area are already well covered by Europe.

One of the problems in Africa as a market is that there is less than 1% broadband penetration and reliable electricity still only reaches 5%: http://appfrica.net/blog/2008/08/16/the-current-state-of-int...

Apple's products are surely too expensive for the vast majority in Africa, the products can be sold there but it doesn't mean they need offices there.

Google, Yahoo and Facebook need more computers there or to expand more into to mobile there.

I think you are proving parents point. Room for a tremendous amount of growth.

I agree but it's going to take a lot longer and require different solutions to the ones they have already developed.

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