I'm Back!

A few weeks ago, I made my way from Nairobi to Kampala, stopping to see a family of lions sleeping soundly after ravaging a water buffalo on the banks of Lake Nakuru.  When I arrived in K'la, I wasn't sure how long I'd stay or what I would do.  Some interesting work has come about. More details soon, but here are the themes: (i) the Africa internet infrastructure; (ii) mobile software;  and (iii) internet & democracy.  And, of course, the latest news from these three fronts.

In London, the Economist covers SEACOM, the first submarine fibre cable to be lit in East Africa, raising the hopes of cheap and fast internet across the region.

In Boston, my colleagues at the Berkman Center write in a WaPo op-ed on the limits of reading Twitter in Tehran.

In Orlando, Hash writes about the keys to running a successful mobile social networks.

Market Access at the Expense of Democratic Ideals?

This is a stylized version of the question facing a handful of corporations, including Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Cisco, who have to figure out how to do business in Internet-censoring markets like China.

How corporations and policy makers in the United States navigate this thorny landscape was the subject of our Digital Democracy class last night (session description here). The first half of the class provided an overview of the state of censorship globally: how states marshal moral, political and security reasons to censor content through IP blocking, DNS blocking and proxy servers tactics.

via Robert Faris and Nart Villeneuve, Access Denied (MIT Press: 2008), Ch. 1

The second half of the class was a simulation of a House of Representatives debate on H.R. 4780- The Global Online Freedom Act, a rather Draconian measure designed to impose export controls on the sale of any item "to an end user in an Internet-restricting country for the purpose, in whole or in part, of facilitating Internet censorship." We were joined for the debate by Sarah Labowitz, my colleague at the Fletcher School, and the first hire at Yahoo!'s human rights shop. Some in the class showed libertarian tendencies, arguing that it was not the prerogative of the US Government to legislate on issues related to domestic politics abroad. Others objected to the legislation for pragmatic reasons: government is too slow to keep up with the technology industry.

Regardless, the class seemed very willing to trust corporations to make the right decisions. This, to a large degree, is how the issue has played out in the real world. Last year, a group of corporations and NGOs, in consolation with Harvard's Berkman Center, started the Global Network Initiative, "a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector."

Africa Tech News Roundup 1.06.09

side street language, via Meg Rorison's photostream

Ads | The Google SA Certification Controversy [IT Web South Africa, 1/3]
http://is.gd/eK8d
"Google South Africa set the cat among the pigeons when country manager Stafford Masie revealed intentions to moderate SA's search industry, saying some e-marketing companies were committing "fraud" against customers."

mBanking | Big Banks in Plot to Kill M-Pesa [Nairobi Star 12/23]
http://is.gd/dc9g
"The unexpected M-PESA probe ordered last week by acting Finance minister John Michuki may have been influenced by an informal cartel of local banks unhappy with the threat posed by Safaricom's mobile money transfer service poses to their business."

Infrastructure | Ericsson Parters With 21st Century Technologies (On Fibre-to-the-Home) [IT News Africa, 1/6]
http://is.gd/eK7Y
"Apart from bringing the much needed Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to the West African nation, the Ericsson-21st Century Technologies partnership will also see Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks being put in place."

Innovation | ngBot.com - Nigeria's First Real Mobile Community [StartupsNigeria.com, 1/6]
http://is.gd/eK7W
"A Nigerian mobile 2.0 community for mobile downloads (mp3s/ringtones, videos, apps, games)and discussions about anything mobile, ngBot...is a user powered community where anyone can contribute to every part of the site..."

Politics | Opposition Leader Declared Winner of Ghana's Presidential Election [NYT, 1/3]
http://is.gd/eK8k
"John Atta Mills of the opposition National Democratic Congress party narrowly won a runoff vote for the presidency of Ghana, one of Africa's most stable and prosperous democracies, electoral officials announced Saturday. " At this time last year, Kenya was smoldering. Its gratifying to see a peaceful transfer of power in Ghana.

Africa Tech News Roundup 12.10.08

worn saturday wall, via Meg Rorison's photostream

Regulation | Minister Orders Audit of Safaricom's M-Pesa Service [Business Daily Africa, 12/10]
http://tinyurl.com/62l6xc
A day before Zain re-launched their own money transfer service, Finance Minister John Michuku ordered an audit of M-Pesa.

Apps | Africa Tech Year in Review 2008 [AppAfrica, 12/8]
http://tinyurl.com/6y6xuc
Jon ranks Google's push into the continent as the number two Africa tech story. Sign up for Jon's podcast, which discusses the use of Twitter in the Ghanaian election, here.

Mobile Internet | Mobile Internet Usage on the Rise in Nigeria [Balancing Act, 12/7]
http://tinyurl.com/33n85
During Q2 and Q3, the percentage of Nigerians accessing the Internet via mobile phones rose 25% while the percentage accessing via a PC grew only 3%, according to a Nielsen survey.

Infrastructure | Nigeria's Suburban Set to Operate a Lagos-Abidjan Regional Terrestrial Fibre Link [Balancing Act, 12/7]
http://tinyurl.com/q7yc8 "As the west coast of Africa prepares for cheaper international bandwidth from three possible contenders (Glo One, Main One and WACS), the race is now on to provide terrestrial fibre links to take traffic to the cheapest landing station."

Politics | Ghana's Elections Go To a Runoff [BBC News, 12/10]
http://tinyurl.com/69yx6p
"Ghana's presidential election must be decided in a second-round vote, the electoral commission has announced." An in-depth analysis is here.

Politics | Why Somalia Matters [Vanity Fair, 12/5]
http://tinyurl.com/6b6wt3
Hartlay argues that if America is not careful, Somalia will become the next Afghanistan.

Africa Tech Weekly Links | 10.21.08

Its autumn. Via Boston.com

MobileActive08: An Idea Whose Time Has Come [Balancing Act, 10/19]
http://tinyurl.com/q7yc8
"As the old Hollywood saying goes, there are only really 5 stories at MobileActive08. Mobiles are now being used to: send out bulk mailings to key target groups (nurses); mobilise supporters; poll people and gather data; to provide answers to inquiries; to offer information support for activities; and raise funds. The majority of this activity is based on the 160 characters available in SMS."

The Problem With Seed Capital in Africa [White African, 10/20]
http://tinyurl.com/55co52
If African entrepreneurs can find seed capital, local funders usually want b/w 40-80% equity stake. "I'm interested in seeing some Y-Combinator style venture funding companies AND communities developing around different regions in Africa. Groups that only fund the very early stages of development ($5000 - $15000) for very short periods of time (3-6 months)."

Innovating From Constraint [My Hearts in Accra, 10/17]
http://tinyurl.com/5ge9sd
Ethan presents 7 rules that help explain how the developing world innovates: (i) innovation comes from constraint; (ii) don't fight culture; (iii) embrace market mechanisms; (iv) use existing platforms; (v) problems are not always obvious from afar; (vi) what you have matters more than what you lack; (vii) infrastructure begets infrastructure.

Banking Crisis Will Be Felt in Africa [CDG Blog, 10/13]
http://tinyurl.com/667jdq "After the Nordic crisis of 1991, Norway's foreign aid fell 10%, Sweden's 17%, and Finland's 62%--from peak to trough after adjusting for inflation."

BarCamp Africa

My wrap-up on BarCamp Africa, post on the official Google Africa Blog:

Over 100 technologists and social entrepreneurs descended on our Mountain View campus last Saturday, October 11th, for BarCampAfrica, an event designed to help strengthen Silicon Valley's ties to our continent. The event contributed to the 'Africa: Open for Business' narrative that gained prominence at TEDGlobal and at this year's BarCamps in Nairobi, Kampala, Mauritius, Madagascar and Johannesburg.

As participants set the agenda for the day, a clear consensus emerged that digital technology has a major role to play in addressing Africa's interconnected business and social challenges. Throughout the day, discussions of laptop distribution models were followed by conversations on the state of democracy on the continent, and talk of the future of mobile payments was followed by insights on mobile solutions for human rights monitoring.

Googlers Matthew Stepka and Andrew McLaughlin jointly opened the event and set the tone for the day. They discussed the challenges and opportunities of Google's work in Africa, and how both policymakers and philanthropists can pave the way for business leaders to succeed. A major theme on the morning panel was the return of centers of excellence to the African continent. Several panelists touched on the encouraging trend of "Re-aspora": Africans returning to their home countries. Others explored the model of the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African university dedicated to developing the next generation of African leaders.

Read more...

barcamp africa

Just watched the sunrise at Google Mountain View before the start BarCamp Africa. Its always fun to be at an event like this in so many roles. Here are some of them.

scholar- writing my thesis (PhD, book?) on the dense confluence of technical skill, policy and other contingencies that allow technology sectors to explore in emerging markets. How can Nairobi become the next Bangalore, Tel Aviv or Hong Kong? How has IT changed the nature of economic growth such that these recent models are less relevant.

google public policy team member- one thing I learned this summer is the best way to influence governments to take up better technology policies is to know the best entrepreneurs on the ground, who can help guide the process.

entrepreneur- for some time now, I've been interested in getting involved on the financing and management side of a nascent tech venture. I'm working with a group of international business students in Boston to find the right venture to support [not connected w/ Google]. Maybe I'll find it today.

A New Center Emerges

Had a great opportunity to train down to Princeton last Thursday to give a Thursday lunch talk at the new Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). CITP is a brand new research center with expertise at the overlap between policy (Woodrow Wilson School) and engineering (Computer Science Department). I love this approach, because I've been increasingly cognizant of the effect that tech entrepreneurs in developing countries are having on public policy.

The talk gave me a chance to reflect on two of the big projects I've been working over the last year, and what is to come (more soon on that scheming). The abstract:

How can policy makers in developing countries craft information technology policies that will drive economic growth? How do mobile phones and the Internet change how citizens participate in democracy and the political process? While a rich and varied discourse has emerged around each of these questions, these discussions has largely excluded Africa, perhaps due to a paucity of evidence. However, this trend is changing as Africa becomes one of the world’s fastest growing markets for information technology. Through the lens of two of my recent research papers, I will discuss the promise the Internet holds for economic and political development in Africa.

Critical Elements of an African Internet Economy (forthcoming), co-authored with Google’s Head of Global Public Policy Andrew McLaughlin, presents public policy components for African governments that recognize that bandwidth is a fundamental input into the information economy. While African governments are in very different stages of developing their Internet economies, each must address a common set of policy issues including fiber infrastructure, spectrum, competition and local content.

The Role of Digital Technology in Kenya’s 2007-08 Presidential Election Crisis, part of Harvard’s Berkman Center Internet and Democracy Case Study Series, illustrates how digital technologies were a catalyst to both predatory behavior, such as ethnic-based mob violence, and civic behavior, such as citizen journalism and human rights campaigns during the recent violence in Kenya. While this paper is a first cut at history, it is also an attempt to bring the African experience into the sociological and political science discourse on the Internet’s effect on democracy.

Joshua Goldstein is a masters candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, studying development economics and information technology policy with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He currently conducts research with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Google Inc. Before attending the Fletcher School, he worked for USAID in Uganda. Notably, he recently published Embracing ‘Open Access’ in East Africa: A Common Internet Infrastructure Policy Agenda for Human Security and Economic Development” in Princeton’s Journal of Public and International Affairs and Harvard’s Berkman Center Working Paper Series. He blogs at In An African Minute.

'People Will Work on Their Mobiles in Africa, We Just Don't Know How Yet'

As I mentioned in a recent post, one of the most striking aspects of the African Internet economy is that we don't know what the mobile Internet will look like when it is proliferated in Africa, much the same way we didn't know that banking would like M-Pesa.

My best glimpse yet of the future came yesterday at Nathan Eagle's talk at the Kennedy School. To be honest, I was somewhat embarrassed that I hadn't come across some of the brilliant work he is doing.

He started off the talk by saying "people are going to do work on their mobile phones in Africa, we just don't know what it is yet." However, three of his projects give some hint of what is to come.

Entrepreneurial Research and Programming on Mobiles
A program to support computer scientists and other engineers in their efforts to create mobile applications for the developing world context. They host an SMS Bootcamp, mobile phone programming for entrepreneurs, and mobile web apps. The program is now in 10 countries with 15 local computer science professors and lecturers.

These workshops have spawned a dizzying array of companies, in the fields of MDSS, mobile medicine, SIM-based application development, reality mining [w/ Christopher Waranga at Univ. of Nairobi], SMS bloodbank, Boonanet [commodity pricing], SMS gateways, air time regulator, stolen car alerts, business directories, pre-paid electricity, weather forecasts, MoKoSo [craigslist] and crush lists.

txteagle
A start up based on three premises: (i) there are 1.5 billion poor literate mobile users in the developing world with time on their hands; (ii) corporations would benefit from 'crowd-sourcing' millions of tiny tasks that will always be done better by people than by computers; (iii) mobile phone networks have tons of underutilized capacity.

Txteagle "enables these tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe." Say, for example, that Mozilla needs a Luganda language version of Firefox. They would ask people who speak Luganda to translate some of the key words. The machine parcable nature of text responses means that algorithms can identify talent and weed out those gaming the system.

The project is in a very early stage of identifying which tasks are best answered by SMS, and at this point 'they are throwing ideas against the wall, and seeing which ones stick.'

Reality Mining
Nathan's more academic work is on behavioral inference of complex systems in the developing world. At the Santa Fe Institute this summer, he built a super computer that can map, for example, where all of Rwanda's international phone calls in go in a single day.

This could be useful for understanding human patterns and affinities in outlier events like earthquakes, financial networks, urban planning, housing management, and movement dynamics. The most fascinating measurement of the economic influence of mobiles is a study that compared graphs of fish prices in three different regions of India before and after mobile base stations where installed. Before the base stations, the prices were erratic and subject to the whims of the larger buyers. After base stations, the data flat lined, showing that the ability to communicate has a profound effect on the price of tradeable goods in the developing world.

Information Technology Business in sub-Saharan Africa

At the Berkman Center last Tuesday, Ethan Zuckerman and Eric Osiakwan gave a talk on The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in sub-Saharan Africa. Here is my summary of Eric's portion of the talk. [Ethan's is here]

----
Eric tells two stories of innovation in Africa.

The ONE Network
In 1997, Sudanese Entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim was running MSI Cellular, at a time when there were only 2 million mobiles on the African continent. His goal was to develop a European quality mobile network without paying a bribe. He developed a model called incremental infrastructure, where instead of building out a national network, you invest in a single base station, get handsets to many people, and develop the network once more capital becomes available. He used this strategy to build a substantial network in 14 countries. In April 2005, Celtel bought MTC for $3.4 billion, which later rebranded as ZAIN's ONE Network.

The TEAMS Submarine Cable
Eric is a believer [and an investor] in SEACOM, one the major submarine fiber cables [slowly] racing to bring connectivity to East Africa in the coming few years. He predicts TEAMS will bring costs down from $7000 to $500 for a 2mbps connection. This will be critical to meeting the pent-up demand for Internet connectivity, driving both economic and social growth.

What do these stories say about the state of innovation in Africa? The main take away is that while projects like this seem like 'slam dunk' investments [earning 40%/year at some points], they are not getting the type of attention from the capital markets that they deserve. The TEAMS cable, for example, has the Government of Kenya as a major investor, which is a fine enough stop-gap measure, but prevents interest from others who are concerned with nationalization. Investors continue to be unfamiliar with Africa, and thwarted by major disasters like the one in Kenya.

Networks and Tech Entrepreneurship in Africa

At the Berkman Center last Tuesday, Ethan Zuckerman and Eric Osiakwan gave a talk on The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in sub-Saharan Africa. Here is my summary of Ethan's portion of the talk.

--
In the 1990's, the physical location of all the critical elements of a successful tech venture [programmers, sys admins, sales, content, management] mattered a great deal. Analee Saxenion's 1998 classic "Regional Advantage" discusses what made Silicon Valley successful than Boston's Rt. 128 Tech Corridor.

The key is choosing the network model over the autarkic model. In Silicon Valley, changing companies frequently was encouraged, allowing talented employees to change jobs frequently and promote new innovation. In Boston, everyone tried to build everything in-house, which was a recipe for failure.

Today, the model has become more decentralized, to the possible benefit of African economies. The need for the critical elements still exists, but they can be in Orlando or Cape Town or Toronto, all working on a project based in Accra. This is promising.

One can see this evolution in social as well as economic ventures. In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Kenyan Presidential Election Crisis, one saw these networks emerge in six distinct ways, demonstrating the sagacity of these networks [Nota Bene: I'm co-authoring a paper on this topic w/ Juliana Rotich to be publish later this fall in Harvard's Berkman Center Working Paper Series']

1. SMS used to promote violence;
2. Mashada.com- a popular Kenyan message board shut down after many violent messages, and the subsequent creation of Ihavenotribe.com
3. Blogs became Newspapers, 48 hour period where broadcast journalism was not reporting live, pretty common to read blogs over radio;blogs as mass media
4. PR Campaign Globally- a group of writers who wrote in major publications to change the narrative away from genocide,
5. Mama Mikes- alternative remittance, send $100 as a voucher for petrol, mobile phone minutes, with far less overhead than Western Union
6. Ushahidi.com- a platform for reporting incidents of violence via mobile and posting them online.

--
The decentralization is promising for both social and economic entrepreneurs. It would be great to see a study of how these networks are contributing to wealth in African economies. A possible idea for Fletcher's Center for Emerging Market Enterprises.

The Future of Internet in Africa, and How to Build It Pt. I

Spending this summer at Google thinking about how African policy makers can create conditions for more and cheaper Internet in Africa [paper on the subject forthcoming], one thing continuously struck me: we really don't know what the Internet will look like [device and app-wise] when it is plentiful in Africa, much the same way we didn't know that banking in Africa would look like M-Pesa. The solution will certainly be mobile, but the big winners in African entrepreneurship often come up with unique, creative solutions tailored to Africa needs, not simply imported from abroad.

In 'Mobile Broadband Internet in Africa, Hash talks about the importance of mobile data. Money quote:

While it's good to talk about mobile phone penetration, I was a lot more interested in seeing the discussion going on around mobile broadband internet and how that is the next big move in Africa for the operators. Passing data, not just voice, is the battleground of the future in Africa - and all the carriers are fighting to position themselves to win.

East Africa 'Open Access' and Beyond

My paper, "Embracing Open Access in East Africa: A Common Internet Infrastructure Policy for Human Security and Economic Development" was published last week in Princeton's Journal of Public and International Affairs. The paper is available here.

Abstract:

In East Africa, development practitioners, economists, and
local entrepreneurs believe the Internet can be a catalyst for
economic growth and human development. However, these
three communities lack a common agenda to make increased
access a reality. This article attempts to find common language
among these communities, and suggests they support a policy
framework called Open Access, which aims to provide Internet
access to the most people at the lowest cost through marketbased
solutions and limited public financing.

It's a fact that East Africa will have fiber in the next two years (see cool graph from White African). My next research question is how governments around the continent can promote competition, innovation, local content and ultimately more and cheaper broadband [regardless of the fiber situation.]