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Africa 2.0: Inside a continent’s communications revolution provides an important history of how two technologies – mobile calling and internet – were made available to millions of sub-Saharan Africans and the impact they have had on their lives. The book deals with the political challenges of liberalisation and privatisation that needed to be in place to get these technologies built. It analyses how the mobile phone fundamentally changed communications in sub-Saharan Africa and the ways Africans have made these technologies part of their lives. It examines critically the technologies’ impact on development practices and the key role development actors played in accelerating things like regulatory reform, fibre roll-out and mobile money. The book considers how corruption in the industry is a prism through which patronage relationships in government can be understood. The arrival of a start-up ecosystem has the potential to break these relationships and offer a new wave of investment opportunities. The author seeks to go beyond the hype to make a provisional assessment of the kinds of changes that have happened over three decades. It examines how and why these technologies became transformative and seem to have opened out a very different future for sub-Saharan Africa.
This chapter provides a critical description of the ‘start-up ecosystem’ for tech-enabled businesses. It looks at the deep challenges faced by local African start-ups and by international start-ups coming into the continent, using examples of e-commerce and ride hailing. The opening section looks at how two entrepreneurs – one Kenyan and the other Nigerian – came together to create an ambitious, pan-continental payments company and how they changed what it did as the market changed, and how they sought to find a profitable niche
.] Eric kept saying ‘I gave you budget and you're not spending it.’ […] Eventually the Africa team got a director (in 2013) and an Excom was created that was much more oriented towards implementation. 56 Google chose four areas to focus on: access to the internet and infrastructure, local content, policy and regulation and the start-up ecosystem
pipeline and a (seemingly) seamless experience for their customers. Their approach is closely linked to newly emerging technical capabilities in online services and Big Data but it is also a reflection of capabilities and modes of being that extend beyond the screen. The hope for the blossoming start-up ecosystem and the services industry that preceded continues to be that opportunities in the digital and knowledge economy will compensate for losses in traditional modes of production and energise the productivity and creativity of citizens. Drawing on multiple lines of
little or no impact on a range of corrupt businesses’ dealings in the communications sector. The final part of this book looks at how the start-up ecosystem in sub-Saharan Africa ( Chapter 8 ) came about and its different impacts. The concluding Chapter 9 looks at the success story of liberalisation, the money that drove the changes it brought about, the continuing digital divide and the relationship between technologies and key behaviours. Notes 1
operators, commercial model challenges created by online and social media and the continuing digital divides in poorer peri-urban and rural areas. Successful mobile money services are de facto monopolies that are storing up challenges for the future. The most optimistic scenario for sub-Saharan Africa's digital future is that the ‘changing of the guard’ will put African ‘digital natives’ into power, within the private sector and as consumers of the services described in Chapters 5 and 8 . The start-up ecosystem has the potential to break the
From 2010 onwards, the changes described in Chapters 2 , 4 and 8 would transform how ICT4D was carried out in sub-Saharan Africa. These included the use of mobile money, more mobile internet subscribers and innovation promoted by a start-up ecosystem supported by international donors: ‘[Before 2010] the infrastructure just wasn't there and that was a huge bottleneck that stopped innovation.’ 75 One example of how ICT4D went ‘mainstream’ is the way m-health found wider