In fact, this is the main reason I blog at all. When I was starting out, finding information on doing tech business anywhere, much less in Uganda or Africa, was non-existant. I want to help ensure that’s not the case for the next generation of disruptors and thinkers.

This is why recently I launched a new podcast called GosTalk.tv. GosTalk is a show where I share my own business experiences, advice, and tips, to hopefully help others do (or not do) some of the things I have. In my own career I’ve started two companies (Appfrica and MetaLayer), joined another early-stage startup (Ushahidi) as they hit their peak growth period, and invested in a number of other early-stage companies (HiveColab, Abayima). All three were very different experiences and hopefully those experiences will prove useful to others seeking to learn.

If you think you’ll like the show, Subscribe on iTunes here. You can find two episodes below to give you an idea of what to expect.

GosTalk Episode 3 “Getting Things Done” How to stay productive as an entrepreneur and beat procrastination.

GosTalk Episode 5 “Hack the Press!” Jon is in Moscow! In this episode we discuss how to hack PR to make the press you get more effective.

My interview with Radio Netherlands about mobile apps, Africa, Abayima, and supporting the continent’s nascent innovators…

“A revolution is taking place in Africa,” according to the Fill the Gap organizers. And it’s “driven by mobile technology and rapidly growing access to the mobile which is the key to smart entrepreneurship and citizen participation.”

What does Gosier think about that? “I would reverse that statement to say, smart entrepreneurship is the key to mobile innovation,” he says. “The same goes for ‘citizen participation’ and ‘need’. The buzz in its current form is flawed because it assumes that innovation in itself provides solutions that can help people.”

Read it In Full

The edited footage of the talk this interview can be found here.

==
Technologie: Les Africains Prennent Leur Destin En Main

Le buzz au cours de l’événement Fill the Gap a été “une révolution se déroule en Afrique, entraînée par la technologie mobile et par l’accès de plus en plus rapide au mobile qui constitue la clé de l’esprit d’entreprise et de la participation citoyenne.”

Selon Gosier, il est essentiel de commencer par un besoin et ensuite voir si et comment la technologie mobile peut faire partie de la solution. “Je voudrais revenir sur cette déclaration pour dire qu’un astucieux esprit d’entreprise est la clé de l’innovation mobile,” explique-t-il. “Il en est de même pour la “participation citoyenne” et le “besoin”. Le buzz dans sa forme actuelle est imparfait, car elle suppose que l’innovation par elle-même fournit des solutions qui peuvent aider les gens.”

Lire l’article complet

Jonathan Gosier, founder of Appfrica speaks about examples of good mobile technology initiatives in Africa at Fill the Gap 9 in NEMO, Amsterdam. Moving ‘beyond the mobile hype’ requires asking different questions about what we do and what we’re trying to accomplish. Moving forward we should consider not just the effects of technology projects but its affects across society.

References Ushahidi, Apps4Africa, Appfrica, Question Box, African top-level domains and nurturing future African talent.

The slides are below…

The Business of VCs

Very quietly, over the past few weeks the word ‘bubble’ has crept back into the English language as it relates to the investment/silicon valley/tech scene. This is because there have been some staggering valuations, startling exits, and incredible hype for companies that seem to defy common sense. Well, they seem to defy common sense because they do.

In a recent article published by the New York Times entitled “Disruptions: With No Revenue, an Illusion of Value“, Nick Bilton makes the argument that startups that have revenue (meaning they actually add value to someone who’s willing to pay for what they offer) are at a disadvantage when it comes to getting funded. The reason being, he argues, is that investors prefer to build valuation metrics on less tangible things like hype, user traction and perceived market opportunity. This is validated by serial entrepreneur/investor Paul Kedrosky who states, “It serves the interest of the investors who can come up with whatever valuation they want when there are no revenues. Once there is no revenue, there is no science, and it all just becomes finger in the wind valuations.”

Those ‘finger in the wind’ valuations tend to skew high for startups with the right network of investors and individuals involved.

Value vs. Venture

So getting back to my point, this investment thesis is in direct conflict with investments needed in developing nations where the only thing that matters is real value and hype is utterly irrelevant. So why would an African tech entrepreneur expect interest from these types of VCs? They probably shouldn’t.

In the ‘Global North’ (as Western nations prefer to refer to themselves) where GDP growth remains all but flat it’s the opposite, investors know there’re only a few ways to create real value for society. But those ways are tough, big problems that the State frequently intervenes in solving. For instance, alternative energy markets and clean transportation. We’ve already established that GDP growth is relatively flat here, so actually in Western nations the easier game to play is not to add value to society, but to either create the illusion of value for shareholders, or to simply disrupt other industries (essentially moving value from one place to another).

If you don’t believe this, let’s do some simple math. What would the GDP of America be if Facebook didn’t exist? After all, Facebook only has around 1000 employees and about $2 billion dollars in revenue. Yet, it has a $150 billion valuation. Alternatively, the collapse of General Motors almost sank the USA’s economy and it employs over 75,000 people operating on $150 billion dollars in revenue. One produces a lot of ‘likes’. The other produces a lot of physical product that in turn enables other industry. One employs those with a highly specialized skill honed at elite universities with a starting salary of $60k at the lowest, with the vast majority of non-executive making at least $80k or more. The other, General Motors if you aren’t following, employs people with less specialized skills that could be acquired at any US university, at a starting salary of $30k, with the vast majority of non-executive staff making in the realm of $60k. So the answer to the question of ‘What would the GDP of America be if Facebook didn’t exist?’ is: pretty much the same. Again, the faltering of GM nearly caused the implosion of the American economy (given how much revenue it accounts for and how many industries it touches).

But aside from the net worth of the millionaires and billionaires that run and work for it, Facebook doesn’t directly produce anything that can be commoditized by anyone, other than Facebook. Alternatively, if you buy a GM car, ride it for a few years, and sell it, although you may not have completely commoditized what they produced, their products have in effect added value to the world multiple times. First for the company that made it (General Motors), then the car dealer that sold it to you, then you, then whoever you sold it to, and whoever they sold it to, and so on and so on.

The Circle of Wealth

Tangible goods have finite value, which although may diminish over time, will never hit absolute zero. I can go to a landfill tomorrow, dig up some random junk from 1932 and sell it to ‘someone’ for ‘something’ – an antique dealer, a flea market, groups that recycle waste for profit etc. But what can I do with my five years of Facebook history? I can’t commoditize it any way, even if Facebook can. A few companies like Klout and Kred have figured out ways of commoditizing social activity, but it’s debatable how sustainable their models are.

This is not to say that intangible value is completely worthless, it just means that companies that commoditize intangible value largely rely upon investors to fuel growth until they get to a point where they are acquired for a multiple of what those investors have put in up to that point. This is what makes intangible value seem like it creates real value, when in fact all that’s occurred is a redistribution of wealth – from one company that has excess of cash – to a smaller company that has an excess of shareholders.

When you look at companies like Google, they are incredibly good at turning the actual value they offer other industries into healthy profit margins. When you look at companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, they are incredibly good at turning a steady traction of users, attention, and coverage by the press into actual value for themselves, by getting investors to pump more and more cash in to fuel growth. When these companies go public, there is increased pressure to either keep growth (and thus hype strong) or to actually start generating the kind of revenue that justifies the valuations of investors. Those investors control funds that have been created by a few wealthy individuals, but mostly other companies, usually companies that produce something of actual value seeking return on their investments.

So in a really odd way, the holy grail of investment is creating things of perceived value over things that have actual, measurable value, because it allows said investors to essentially move wealth back and forth without diluting their market. Occasionally there’s a rare moment where there is an absolutely massive exit that makes it all worthwhile (ex. Andressen-Horowitz cashing out at $78 million on a $250,000 investment into Instagram). But that money didn’t come from thin air, it came from venture capitalists. Those VCs got it from their funds, and their funds got it from companies that produce tangible goods or services seeking to maximize profits by putting money into such funds. As you can see it’s not that difficult, it’s brilliant, but very much circular in terms of where value comes from and where it ends up.

A Simple Science

So why don’t these types of investors take risks on African market opportunities? For starters, there’s the usual explanations: there’s not enough money to make it worth their while, the political and legal environments aren’t reliable enough, or the societies themselves aren’t stable enough. Then there’s other excuses like: there’s not enough talent to sustain growth, the cost of doing business is too high, or locality – they like to keep investments close and these countries are simply too far. But the real reason, it seems, is that in developing countries nothing is more necessary than something they’d rather avoid – absolute, measurable value.

When it comes to profit, many modern VCs simply aren’t interested unless that profit comes in the form of their exit from the business. For those who don’t know, ‘to exit’ means to sell the stock acquired through their investment in a company to another party. This usually comes in the form of someone else either buying them out directly, or buying the company they’ve invested in, effectively buying all the stock at a new price – when the investor bought it at an older (cheaper) price.

So if investors from the Global North are used to playing a game where the only things that matter are perceived value, why on earth would they ever enter markets where everything has to be measured in terms of actual value? It’s a simple science: stay away.

The Inverse Problem

NGOS, Charities, and traditional Philanthropists actually compound the problem immensely. With most of the wealthiest investment funds in the world looking to keep up a game of illusions and ‘wealth remixing’, Philanthropists are playing a different game.

For one, they are largely funded by thier governments (groups like USAID). The ones that aren’t are funded by private foundations and individual donors (groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Both types of Philanthropists (Governments and Donors) think in terms of absolute value but for them that value equates societal impact. These types of investors (after all Philanthropists are investing in something too) are looking for results like reduced infant mortality rate, improved test scores at schools, and a greater standard of living for the poorest.

They tend to measure success using globally understood milestones like the Millennium Development Goals, or relative measurements of progress like ‘reduced corruption’. Thus, the value they seek by is the inverse of what Venture Capitalists seek – societal impact versus and intangible (perceived) impact.

What’s missing is that neither of these groups (VCs or Philanthropists) are interested in the actual, measurable, impact created by businesses that maybe don’t have any direct social impact but that do create actual jobs from revenue. Even the few investors who claim to be interested in investing in African businesses make the mistake of looking for either: a quick exit based on intangible value (ie. selling the company quickly to someone else), or societal impact that may or may not be tied to a sustainability model. There’s nothing wrong with either scenario, great companies are built and invested in from both spaces. But there is a gap, and it lies with those companies that simply want to to be great, long-lasting, bottom-line focused companies.

Where do they find capital to scale to keep doing what they do? In Western societies this gap is filled by banks who offer debt (loans or lines of credit) to consumers. In developing countries, this is still a problem for small business owners. Local banks don’t operate with enough liquidity to make such investments profitable and foreign banks find the markets to risky (in comparison to their less risky, highly profitable investments abroad) to even consider it.

I suppose you might be thinking that ‘microfinance’ was going to be the silver bullet that killed this beast? Well, microfinance certainly gives access to capital to the very poor, which has immeasurable positive economic impact on society. But there are negative impacts as well. Since debt is such a foreign concept (funds accessed through microfinance methods are almost always loans) the costs of taking such loans are quantifiable, while defaults have consequences (as they should). Some societal norms make it the case that women taking out loans are put at risk by envious husbands who simply take the money and spend it recreationally. Still, however helpful or detrimental micro-financing is, at loans of an average of a few hundred dollars, it doesn’t reach the most important business class of the population: local SME’s that increasingly employ the burgeoning African middle class.

Local Investors Remain Silent

You would think that given the failure of foreign investors to see the opportunity that relatively small amounts of cash could have on these societies, and the failure of Philanthropists to see the business opportunity, that local investors would be well-poised to fill the gap. Not so.

Local investors are so desperate to cling to their wealth that they tend to give their money to foreign funds for management. Or in the scenario where they feel guilty about their success or maybe philanthropic in their own right, they donate to non-profits to help acheive social impact. In that regard the local African multi-millionaire is no more knowledgable about these issues than any foreign investor would be!

Et tu, Diaspora?

Make no mistake, the African diaspora has 100% filled this gap for decades. A businessman working on wallstreet hears from his cousin in Nigeria that they need a few thousand dollars to grow their company, so he sends it; a brother who’s expatriated sends money to his younger sibling to help them start up a hair salon; the parent who works for a foreign embassy pumps money into their child’s aspirations of building the first Pan-African social network. I’ve witnessed each of these stories first-hand, they aren’t anecdotal. Remittances are great, for some people. What they aren’t is systematic and scalable, and so they are almost irrelevant.

The power of the Venture Capital industry, and likewise the Philanthropic/Non-Profit industry, is that they are in fact industries. They have been orchestrated to create jobs and wealth for huge portions of society. While the ephemeral diaspora is a great thing, it is unorganized, haphazard, and unreliable at scale.

In an article published on The Sojourner Project, A. Conerly Coleman writes, “Diaspora aid has surpassed international aid on the continent of Africa.” She then goes on to make the case that Africa ‘doesn’t need international Aid.’ Until someone can organize remittances into something that looks more like a Venture fund or even more like a Multi-national Aid agency, I’m afraid to say such thoughts are simply wishful thinking.

Whether you’re for developmental aid, or against it, at least we mostly understand how it’s distributed and it’s also non-tribal. Remittances are useless for someone starting a business in Lagos, Nigeria when they have no family who’s ever moved abroad. And they are even less likely to be successful in finding money if they start asking other random families from, say, Kampala, Uganda.

I do have huge hopes that someone will crack this problem. Companies like VC4Africa, Afrilabs and MYC4 have come close but we’d all be incredibly naive to proclaim the problem as solved.

The Middle is Still Missing

Five years ago all of this was as much of a problem as it is now. There is still no fund (that I’m aware of) that invests in African companies which lack an obvious social focus, or that that won’t result in relatively quick exits. The idea of patient capital popularized by Jacqueline Novogratz couldn’t be less-so when it somes to African SMEs. It’s often the opposite – more like a strict, catholic nun waiting with a yard stick to smack the hands of any African venture that should dare to do anything…well…normal.

Disclosure: I’ve been working for years at this problem through my ventures Appfrica and Apps4Africa, as well as the projects with others I’m involved in AfriLabs and HiveColab. As a result, I have made or participated in several investments into African SMEs professionally. However, I as an individual don’t command the kind of wealth that a fund would. The challenge is to make such things happen on a larger scale, in order to spread such opportunities around to more than just a few.

Last year the theme of the competition was Climate Challenge, which means all the entrants should have focused on solving climate change and adaptation issues that affect their local communities. Over the course of 7 months our teams are going to over 15 countries to support the competition, answering questions and hosting workshops. Since we’re now two thirds through the competition, I wanted to share descriptions of the 6 winners from the East Africa and West/Central regional competitions.

The East Africa winners were announced on January 14th, 2012 at Villages In Action in Kikuube, Uganda. The West/Central Africa winners were announced on December 8th, 2011 in Durban, South Africa at the COP-17 Climate Change Conference.

East Africa Winners

1st prize of $15,000 – The Grainy Bunch by Eric Mutta (Tanzania)
The Grainy Bunch is a national grain supply chain management system that monitors the purchase, storage, distribution, and consumption of grain across the entire nation. It was developed with the understanding that selling “the effects of efficiency” to actors in the grain supply chain is much easier than selling “the effects of climate change”.

Grain is nicknamed the “white oil” which lubricates the engine of Tanzanian growth. Even short-term disturbances in its supply chain adversely affects hundreds of thousands of people. To ensure both food security and economic security for all Tanzanians, a system is required to both monitor and facilitate the supply chain of grain, from the soil to our plates.

2nd prize of $7,000 – Mkulima Bora – Stepheno Maleche, Gerry Nandwa, Joseph Onginjo and Oliver Otieno (Kenya)
Mkulima Bora enables farmers to input the type crop they wish to plant into an app, then it cross-checks meteorological data to determine if the crop is suitable given the timing and location. Mkulima improves farmer yields, saves them time, and money

3rd Prize of $3,000 – Agro Universe – Oliama Brian, Daniel Mumbere, Nabuto Josephine, Bossa Alex, Sanya Duncan, Olwenyi Victor, Kato Charles, Masaba Kizito, Kalema Moses, Namuyiga Winfrey (Uganda)
Agro Universe allows farmers with agriculture products or livestock to alert the app’s community so that they can buy and sell goods from each other. It works on both mobile and the web. The aim of Agro Universe is to create a regional marketplace where products can be sold that may have no demand in the user’s immediate area but that might in areas farther out.

West/Central Africa Winners

1st prize $15,000 – HospitalManager by Victor Ogo Ekwueme (Nigeria)
HospitalManager is a web-based application that helps hospitals and health organizations prepare for disasters such as floods and storms. More frequent heat spells, rains, and floods are leading to heath emergencies, both due to the event itself, and later to water related disease. HospitalManager will help hospitals in Nigeria, and potentially throughout Africa, identify patterns in patient visits following rains and floods, so that staff can better prepare for these situations and save more lives. Hospitals can anticipate incoming disease and emergency patterns using real time climate forecasts. On longer time scales it will allow policy makers to plan locations of new hospitals.

2nd prize $7,000 – Eco-fund Forum by Assane Seck, Guillaume Blandin and Markus Faschina (Senegal)
Eco-fund Forum is a web-based community organizer and geo-localized data exchange tool to help individuals and communities working on sustainable resource management throughout Africa to share their own experiences on best practices. Thus they will better understand and respond to the climate change challenges impacting each specific local context. For example, coastal communities in Senegal that suffer from erosion can learn from neighbors that are successfully and durably overcoming the same problem by regenerating and preserving a littoral forest. Furthermore, the Forum will give those communities a voice which should alert political decision makers to address climate change challenges in time.

3rd prize $3,000 – Farmerline by Alloysius Attah and Emmanuel Owusu Addai (Ghana)
Farmerline is a mobile and web-based system that furnishes farmers and investors with relevant agricultural information to improve productivity and increase income. Lack of information about weather patterns and about which crops grow best in a changing climate hurts rural farmers’ yields. Cell phone use is growing rapidly throughout Ghana, including in rural areas. This mobile tool can help farmers in Ghana to get information about agricultural best practices down to the farm level, including choosing crops best suited for their specific location, and how to prepare for changes in the weather (including dry spells, changes in seasonal onset, and extreme events).

East Africa Honorable Mentions

CoHeW – Geno Juma, Nicholas Mugah
The CoHeW program is designed as an aid to the community health worker (CHWs). The program will have a two pronged approach; it gives stop gap solutions to the respondent and serves as an information gathering tool for the CHWs. The ministry of health and other health administration planners need a source of information on likely occurrences of diseases and projected disease outbreak periods.

AgriRight (Plant it Right) – Nyambura Muhia, Wamahiga Grace, Njeri Winnie, Harun Mwangi
AgriRight is a mobile app that helps farmers plant crops that are right for a particular area.Many farmers, plant crops which are not sustainable for a particular area, which leads to a waste of resources (time, money, energy). They often incur huge losses, reaping very little or no crops at all.

West/Central Africa Honorable Mentions

iProtect
An application that allows residents report issues like bush burning and deforestation in real time via SMS. It’s a citizen reporting and preparedness project that allows the public to alert the greater community of emergency events.

Mobile Agri Business
Mobile Agribusiness is an agriculture application for farmers to have information, skills and to connect them to available market in real-time in DRCongo. The project aims to create a mobile market place for farmers in Congo.

What’s next for Apps4Africa? Well it’s too soon to say but the Climate Challenge will begin in the Southern Africa region in a few short weeks. Bookmark this post and come back in early April to find out who the Southern Africa regional winners will be! If you’d like to get involved with Apps4Africa or the winners, please email us at info@apps4africa.com. Many of the entrants are choosing to open source their code which you can find here on GitHub.

In the American and European tech space there’s a growing problem. There’s so much funding available for early stage startups that everyone and their college dropout buddy is starting-up, leaving no one out there to hire.

It’s one of those first world problems: “We just raised 4 million dollars for our social network for redheads but we can’t find any developers…frowny face.”

If Silicon Valley is having trouble hiring top tech talent, then it means that there’s also a drought in the NGO space. Even the biggest non-profits are suffering from the same lack of technical resources.

If you’re an African developer, this is a huge opportunity. Focus on acquiring (or maturing) some of the following skills. Talent in these areas is elusive even in the U.S. and Europe, being good at them will make you far more employable (or fundable if you want to start a company), globally as well as locally:

For Technical People

• Ruby on Rails A lot of web startups use RoR because it’s a great language and it also impresses investors. However, they quickly realize that it impresses because Rails developers regularly command high salaries due to such high demand.
• Python and or Django The Jan Brady to Ruby’s Macia. Actually, Python is probably more in demand these days simply because more developers are competent in it. It’s also great for mobile app development which makes it useful for all those SMS apps local firms are dying to build.
• iOS – the iPhone continues to dominate the smart phone arena. It’s less relevant if you’re targeting a local audience (there go with Android or stick with Java), but if you are building apps that you want to sell internationally then there’s no app store with a richer economy for developers than Apple’s.
• Data visualization All that ‘open data’ out there is irrelevant. What’s relevant is data that can be used by anyone at any organization, with minimal fuss. Visualization makes it easy to relate complex datasets to those too busy (or too lazy) to analyze them. Data vis goes beyond any specific programing language, but it is a skill and it’s one that Africans can find a great deal of opportunity in.
• Math/Statistics Before one can visualize anything they need the components to visualize. If you’ve got a strong grasp of statistics and analysis, distilling information so that it’s actionable for others (who usually don’t share this skill) is a highly lucrative path to pursue.
• Semantic Analysis Despite what everyone thought, the semantic web is here to stay. It hasn’t become a ‘new web’ like some once thought it might, but semantic technologies (sentiment analysis, natural language processing, text parsing) have become the methods that are routinely used to power some of the web’s most popular applications. These skills are incredibly lucrative. The growth of the ‘Big Data’ industry is fueled by them.
• NoSQL & NewSQL Modern web apps require a great deal of backend engineering to deal with and keep track of all the byproducts of social, sharing, and content creation. There’s two schools of thoughts on this: one is that by doing more of the work on the application side (on request), applications can scale faster while handling more operations from more users. That’s the non-relational approach. The other school of thought is that there was nothing wrong with the old way of doing things, which stores data with the values the application uses for retrieving them later. The challenge was that this created a bottleneck at the database level which often lead to slow or stagnant apps. The new thinking around NewSQL is to keep the relational model and simply build better database software that allows for more throughput. Entire companies are being built of each type of database (see: Cloudera, Vertica, 10Gen), pick the one that makes sense for you. Also, this is the fuel for the Big Data/Open Data rocket ship.
• jQuery/Javascript/Ajax Modern web apps do most of their processing on the front-end. As I mention above, this often means the application side is where most of the logic for the web app lives, while the database becomes a place to store and retrieve. For these types of web apps, front end logic is critical. Given the rise of the Jquery framework this is probably obvious, yet solid front-end developers are few and far between.
• Hardware Engineering The ‘maker’ movement amplified by Afrigadget and Maker Faire Africa highlights another opportunity on the continent, the localization of manufacturing. Whether it’s bicycles or mobile devices, companies local to the continent that design and build things are scarce.

For Less Technical People

• Design Look at the majority of African websites. Most websites made by African developers still look like they were made in 1999 using the GeoCities default templates (translation: Fugly). Blegh. There is a bounty out for good African designers. The mistake a lot of programmers make is they assume design is about technical know-how. It’s not – it’s about a sense of aesthetic and attention to detail. If you are a lazy designer, you’re not a designer. If you are a programmer who thinks design is superfluous to your application, then you’re doing it wrong. There’s also a dearth of design talent in the U.S. and Europe and a good designer can command the salary of a top programmer. Where are the African designers?
• Writing You would be surprised at the number of people who can’t string together a well-written, cohesive, consistant thought in written form. Coupled with the rapid proliferation of social media (which, by the way, consists of mostly written messaging) the ability to write and write well has become incredibly important. I say this because you are not at a disadvantage if you are a non-native speaker. Example: Ariana Huffington is a non-native english speaker and she built a highly influential and powerful new media outlet that rivals old-school powerhouses like CNN and FOX on the web. It’s about being able to convey your thoughts cohesively and convincingly. It takes practice, so keep blogging!
• Project Management Being the person who can cultivate the best traits from your team of peers is a huge asset that has always been rare. Many people manage, few excel at it.
• Videography – We’ve all heard that there isn’t enough local content being produced for African audiences. One of the reasons is the lack of local producers. However, this is changing. More countries are becoming home to an African creative class who are producing film, television, and web shows locally. Can this be lucrative? I think so. As bandwidth falls in cost, eventually the demand for local content may not come from international viewers but the pan-African audience.
• Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Deductive reasoning. The ability to deduce conclusions and the reasons why they have occurred. To do this, you have to be able to consider all sides and all aspects of a problem…even the ones that you don’t like. You have to be able to challenge assumptions, this includes your own. It is a skill to be able to analyze the intricacies of why things happen or if someone’s argument isn’t grounded in reality, and to be able to explain your conclusions to others. This will make you a better anything.

There are companies all over the world looking to hire people with aptitude in these areas, but being in Africa puts you in a position of power because there will be as great a demand for you at home as there is abroad. Does this mean you’d have to relocate to another country? Not necessarily, many of these skills can be outsourced to you or your company.

In 2012 learn the things that are in demand so you can build firms (or offer services) that capitalize on these global trends.

Photo Credit: Ahmed Maawy & Apps4Africa.org

// The Future

The first of these themes is ‘the future’ itself. To be exact, predictive technologies that are being used to improve decision making.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson

This is a favorite quote of mine.  It sums up so much about the post-60’s world we live in. Why the 60’s? Because that was the last time, as far as I can tell (because I wasn’t alive then), that man’s wildest dreams were more sci-fi than reality.  In 1960, even astronauts still dreamed of one day walking on the moon like it was a fantasy. By 1970 it was history. But I digress…

I want to update this quote to read…

“The future is here…and you can buy it!” - me.

What we’re talking about is predictive technologies.  Algorithms that take massive amounts of historic data and analyze it for trends that can be projected outwards.  This is not new science, it’s statistics, but it’s statistics when applied to prediction that is the exploding business.

How effective are predictive technologies?  Well, if you want to see this type of technology in action, go to Google.com right now.  Activate Google Instant and type one or two letters, Google will offer suggestions based upon previous searches by all the people using their search engine and what they type after those two letters. This increases Google’s ability to make an educated guess about what you will type next.

There’s real science behind all of this. It’s not magic. It only works so well, but it does work.

So the future is available for sale from a few companies. To mention a few…Recorded Futures, Palantir, PAX.

Recorded Futures is a good example. They offer their ‘future’ as a service. That’s right, The Future is for sale as a restful API! You can use this API to get your future hand delivered as JSON or XML for the low price of $150 a month! Power your app with the future!

All kidding aside, how is this relevant to Africa?

Well, I can tell you as someone who’s company does work for Governments, Defense contractors, NGOs large and small, these technologies are in use to try to enhance decision making. These predictive technologies are being used all over the continent. To predict conflict & uprisings, crime, the affects of climate change…it goes on and on.  To decide where to spend budgets, enact military action, where to distribute medical resources.

The CDC has been in the business of predicting the future for decades. For them, spotting an outbreak before it spreads is essential.  More and more businesses from marketers, to law enforcement, to medical facilities have grown to appreciate these methodologies.

Heritage Provider Network is offering a $3 million dollar prize to any team who can develop an algorithm that can accurately detect within a year, using only patient and public data, when a patient will need to return to a medical facility.  It’s like the Netflix Prize for medicine.

This is all fascinating, but what happens when prediction goes wrong?

Right now, in Italy, six scientists (seismologists) and one elected official are on trial for not being able to sufficiently predict the future. You read that correctly.

Given their resources, their expertise, and sufficient historic data, the expectation is that something more could, or should, have been done to protect the public from a wrong.  That’s the precedent being set here. It’s not good enough to be an expert, you also now have to be a genie.

If this sounds strangely like the premise of the Minority Report, then you would be correct.  Again, this is William Gibson’s future that we’re living in.

// Data 

The future of data is in everyday things. Networked Objects. Internet of Things. Nanotechnology. These are all names for this type of innovation.

It is important to note: information exists, and has always existed everywhere. Atoms, molecules, DNA…these are all types of information.  What’s changing is our ability to imprint human generated data into the everyday objects around us, and to extract that information using technology.

Medic Mobile from Frontline:SMS aims to be able to allow patients to be photographed using mobile phones, using those photos for the basis of remote diagnosis.  Right now this is a manual process, with actual doctors trying to make diagnoses, but one day this might be done by matching incoming photos with a database of  pre-existing photos. When this becomes a mostly algorithmic process for diagnosing ailments, we’ve arrived at an incredible future.

So being able to extract meaning from every day objects using devices, that’s the future of data.

There’s groups here who are working on it. CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research) has researchers in South Africa exploring the Internet of Things.

But this, too, comes at with huge price.  The easier it is to do things for good with these technologies, the easier, and more tempting it becomes to do harm.

There will come a day at some point in the future (and it’s arguably already here) that genocide could come at the click of a button.  A group of people who aren’t liked could be annihilated with the ease of tapping backspace. Parents will soon be able to go to a medical facility and request more or less of certain types of gene in their children. These are great advancements in technology that can equally become disturbing examples of innovating our way to atrocity.

// Diplomacy

Diplomacy is being disrupted as well.

Even the crudest of technologies is being used to reshape the way government works, both positively and negatively.

Ushahidi is an example of a positive disruption.  In essence, it’s a way to collect information from the public, and put it on a map.  But, as I’ve frequently said, the innovation isn’t the technology. The innovation of Ushahidi lies in the fact that anyone, no matter how amateurish or well-trained, has access to the same tools as professionals.  More importantly, those tools can then be used to deliver services more effectively than the people who are traditionally expected to.

That’s the disruption, service delivery that bypasses Government organizations and Non-Government Organizations, and to be frank, makes them look silly by being faster, more efficient, and scalable.

This type of disruption puts pressure on governments to engage the public, less they appear to be ineffective.  This represents a good exchange.  Positive disruption.

Besides, when governments have too much authority, they tend to ignore public demands.  When the public have too much authority, it leads to anarchy, or they self-organize into communities which later require governing.

The current trend is in what I call equalizing disruption, tech or methods that undermine the power of government authority. The Ushahidis of the world, the WikiLeaks, the Anonymous groups.  In different ways, each of these has out-maneuvered the power or ability of government to exert power.

This doesn’t always play out reluctantly.

Last year the U.S. Department of State began sponsoring an innovation contest where they rewarded African innovators for solving local problems. They have no interest in owning IP, recruiting these individuals, or engaging them in any other way.  They simply wanted to experiment with new ways of reaching out to countries and people.

This competition, Apps4Africa, is one example of a new type of diplomacy.

// Education

In Uganda, Benge Solomon King is teaching basic and advanced robotics to youth across the country – in urban centers and in remote villages. What’s fascinating about Solomon is that he’s entirely self-taught, learning from tutorials and instruction from the internet.

This isn’t rural California where there are a number of places even the poorest will have available to learn (libraries, public schools, experienced adults). This is someone who learned basic electronics, programing, circuitry, and engineering in what is essentially a vacuum.

In Malawi, William Kamkwamba built an electricity producing windmill by reverse engineering its construction from a photograph.

In Nigeria, Muhammed Abdullahi builds working helicopters from scrap metal, with no prior knowledge of aviation or access to resources.

What do all these three stories have in common?  They may well be example of genius on display, randomly spread across the world.  But, I actually think what’s occurring is evidence of how education is broken, and three individuals who circumvented this broken system. Some of the aforementioned individuals have gone on to study engineering formally, but lacking formal education didn’t prevent them from learning in the first place.

It’s clear that the organizations we’ve put in place to deliver a service (education) are ineffective, perhaps even failed.  Replicating this Western model of education in Africa hasn’t scaled beyond urban capitals and is highly ineffective where it has. These individuals may represent what the alternative looks like.

Khan Academy, Kiip, Teach for America…all of these programs have arisen to patch holes in a broken system in the United States, some completely flipping the old education model on its head. Thus, self-instruction, open courseware, and remote video instruction are the technologies that seem to be winning the future of education.

// Disparity

Finally, we can look at the present, and we can look at the past, and with no special prediction technology, conclude that the future will be grossly unequal.

We have to be cautious that we aren’t building a future where the aforementioned technologies and others aren’t only available only to the highest classes of society.

In “A Cultural Thought Experiment”, a post from blogger Charlie Stross, he argues that if and when interplanetary space travel and colonization become a possibility, it will only be a possibility for the wealthiest among us.  In other words, the future will be awesome if you’re in the right class.  Much like the 14th Century being fantastic if you were royalty in Europe.

The people who discovered new lands hundreds of years ago, the explorers that shaped the modern world, were also either rich or had rich financiers.  The future will be as defined by disparity as the present is, and the past was.

Charlie Stross is not being paranoid in the least. If you have a spare $350,000 to $1 million lying around you can go to space tomorrow.

It goes without saying that if there is a race to get tourists to space, it will likely echo the rate at which countries were able to get to space in the first place. If that’s true, then African countries would be among the last to go – they ever went at all.

So as I conclude, I want us all to think about the future.  Let’s make our own predictions so that we can correct for mistakes yet to be made.  Let’s strive to make it trend towards the positive. For all of these innovations and disruptions have great implications…as well as implications for great evil.  This is our future in the making and it’s we who will decide how, and if, it’s evenly distributed.

For the past several months I’ve been working on a project for moving data around when there’s no internet.  I talked a bit about this at the Power of Information conference earlier this year in London, but I thought I’d share more here.

Abayima applies cold war tactics to mobile data storage and distribution.

Abayima targets anyone living in oppressive, restrictive, societies around the globe. It was inspired by the information networks during the most recent Uganda elections and the Arab Spring — both situations where electronic communication networks were compromised (or complete shutdown) by authorities.

As a strategy it will work in any country where there are low-end mobile phones, the most accessible communication technology on the planet. As a technology, it works for groups who wish to disseminate messages discretely in a way that mimics one of the oldest forms of communication,  pen and paper.

The History

Two recent events inspired the development of Abayima. In 2011 the internet in Egypt was shut off, preventing activists and dissidents from communicating with each other or the outside world. A few months later, in Uganda, during the reelection campaign for President Yoweri Museveni, the mobile carriers were compromised and monitored for voices of dissent. This allowed for the filtering of text messages that were deemed unacceptable, while the same networks were used to spread electronic propaganda in the form of SMS and MMS messages to the public.

As a Strategy

This conversation shaping using communication technologies for propaganda echoes the intimidation and propaganda techniques used by the German and Soviet governments during World War II and by many other oppressive governments since.  Anyone with two phones and a sim can do this right now but to do it more efficiently we’ll be developing an application to support this type of message storage.

Abayima is largely a strategy for moving messages sans telecom infrastructure. It’s also a toolkit which assumes electronic communication via internet or mobile carrier has been compromised completely and allows activists and journalists to use the SIM cards themselves to publish or distribute information freely.

As a Product

Rather than rely upon high-tech infrastructure, Abayima relies upon centuries old information networks inspired by the Jewish resistance, the underground slave escape routes in the United States, Navajo code talkers, the war scouts of Sparta etc. There is a long lineage of using no or low technical means of encryption to protect sensitive information.

As a technology Abayima is a way of storing information on SIM chips which can then be placed in a mobile phone on the other end to be read.

Examples:

• A journalist writes several sensitive details and stores them to a SIM that isn’t used for texting, but to share the message with only a designated party whom they would hand deliver it to. Because the SIM isn’t used for calls, the only way to intercept the message is physically.
• A group of activists could send messages between two locations using a ‘runner’. When the runner arrives he hands off the SIM which will contain messages for the recipient.
• SIM cards are as ubiquitous as mobile phones and its generally understood how to use them across most populations. Thus, the SIM card itself could be a publishing/distribution mechanism for content of all types.
• For advanced users with access to higher-end technology the messages could be written using a computer and our software, encrypted with software, and stored on the SIM. The receiver would need technology with a key to decrypt the message.  This adds a layer of protection against interception as it becomes necessary to crack the encryption algorithm first.

F.A.Q.

Why not use thumb drives?

Because thumb drives require two computers on either side, a level of infrastructure that exceeds the means of the poorest. The number of people with low end mobile phones, globally, far exceeds the number with access to computers.

Can’t these messages be intercepted?

Yes. Electronic communication like SMS can be ‘sniffed’ while passing through the air.  Paper with notes can be stolen.  People can be tortured to extract information.  There will always be a way to intercept communication.

That said, SIM cards are small, easy to destroy or swallow, and can’t be read without some sort of assistive device. Abayima (the product) can be used to encrypt whatever message is contained, adding another layer of protection.

Aren’t there better ways to distribute information?

Yes. This publishing method is more akin to pen and paper communication. By design, it is inefficient. But it’s highly practical if you have limited resources as it leverages local infrastructure. This is intended to be carried out in ‘last ditch’ scenarios where the more efficient methods of delivery like email, instant messaging, text messaging, VOIP or others have either been compromised by hackers, are being monitored by authorities, or completely disabled.  It’s a work around when the alternative is no long-distance communication at all.

What is a sneakernet? 

It refers to using your feet (sneakers) to move information around, particularly data storage devices. The implication is that though there are clearly other ways to access that information, the sneakernet is the fallback.

Visit the project at http://abayima.com

Shanta Devarajan recently pointed out this ‘statistical tragedy’ of Africa:

To show that this is not an arcane point, consider the case of Ghana, which decided to update its GDP last year to the 1993 system. When they did so, they found that their GDP was 62 percent higher than previously thought. Ghana’s per capita GDP is now over $1,000, making it a middle-income country. The “tragedy” is that we were happily publishing GDP statistics and growth figures for Ghana over the last decades, when in fact the national accounts were understating GDP by 62 percent…. The tragedy is that donors, including the World Bank, undertake statistical activities without ensuring that they are consistent with the NSDS. Why? Because they need data for their own purpose—to publish reports—and this means getting it faster, with little time to strengthen the countries’ statistical capacity. But just as Africans turned around their growth tragedy, they can turn around their statistical tragedy.

It’s no secret that high-level skills in the areas of science, technology, and the maths are rare. This is inevitable in an environment with sparse resources for good education or in countries that have been too politically volatile for education to be possible. For instance, Liberia, where two generations essentially had no access to any sort of modern education due to civil war and ongoing conflict.

But if data is truly the new oil, then mining it, understanding it and building on it is essential to the continent’s future. How do we solve this problem? Education, for teaching basic and advanced maths are one necessity. Building more technical skills like programing is another. Open data initiatives, like the one launched in Kenya earlier this year, are also important. But the more critical need is to build capacity for the conceptual, abstract, and analytic disciplines made up all of these skills combined. This problem is being addressed by a growing number of institutions like the African Leadership Academy.

Where these skills already exist, it’s also necessary to help to surface and distribute the results to the international community. From the Database of African Theses and Dissertations (DATAD):

For many reasons, African research results are rarely indexed in major international databases, a problem that is further exacerbated by the inaccessibility of theses and dissertations completed in the region, many of which contain local empirical data that is not available in international literature. This inability to learn about and access African material is frustrating to students and scholars–both on the continent and overseas.

That said, there are a lot of great resources for quantitative research and analysis related to African countries. Most of them from international NGOs, local governments, or passionate foreigners (like myself), as well as resources like Afrographique, OAfrica, The World Bank, and too many open data initiatives to list here. Hopefully, these resources and others are serving to help build capacity for Africa to craft its own data narratives…refineries for new oil.

Photo Credit: Jon