In an interview with Russel Southwood of Balancing Act, Phase3 outlines their plans to launch the fibre network in Q2 of 2010. The network will plug into undersea cables in Accra, Cotonou, and Lagos. Phase3 hopes to create a redundant network, allowing their clients to avoid month long outages like the one caused by the SAT-3 cut in Benin in August.

Phase3’s Nigeria clients include GSM and CDMA operators, ISPs, banks, and the government. They hope to attract the same types of customers throughout West Africa, especially once they’re able to connect to the new international cables. They will eventually connect with Burkina Faso and Niger through Benin, and hope to carry traffic from the new undersea cables inland.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Twelve young residents of Kibera will first be trained on current mapping techniques during a two-day workshop. Individuals from the growing Nairobi technology scene will help train and network with the larger community. The group will then map all of Kibera over a two-week period in mid-November and share the results through OpenStreetMap, joining a growing global community of tech-savvy grassroots mapmakers. “The project will provide open-source data that will help illustrate the living conditions in Kibera. Without basic knowledge of the geography of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents of Kibera,” said Mikel Maron.

More information can be found at http://www.mapkibera.org/.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

The Grid

The Nigerian features will be slightly different than those in South Africa, as The Grid will no longer have access to location based features. Instead, The Grid will put a larger accent on “chat and interaction around social content.”

As social networks expand in Africa, I’m seeing more and more emphasis on mobile use as opposed to web use. It makes sense, as there are more mobiles than light bulbs in Africa (or at least parts of it). Why not leapfrog computers that need to be plugged in, laptops that need to be balanced somewhere, and move directly to social networks that can be accessed anywhere by anyone with a Java capable mobile phone?

Even more interesting is the emergence of social networks that don’t require Java apps and can be accessed via SMS. The Grid and its ilk offer real competition to networks like Facebook, who can only be accessed via the web or downloaded applications.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

The Mobile Money program requires subscribers to register their SIM chip using a photo ID at an MTN service center or a partner bank. Then, he can use his Mobile Money account at any one of 1,200 authorized merchants. The merchants have to have a bank account at any one of Mobile Money’s partners.

The service is still in “beta,” in everything but name. MTN hopes to grow slowly.

We are still growing very cautiously so as to ensure that we can focus on ensuring the customers we do register are fully comfortable with the process and service. Let us remember that this is a financial services product. When it comes to finance, customers are more conservative than when it comes to airtime. So yes, for now we’re being cautious in registering too many customers too early. We want to lead with below the line advertising to make people aware that we will be coming to the community to register customers. By then, they should be more comfortable with the process/service.

The service has a lot of room to grow, especially as MTN has already launched similar services in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. One of the difficulties facing Mobile Money in Ghana is that banking regulations require that users carry picture identification before making purchases. How many Ghanaians carry their national ID card with them to go to the market?

Banks are excited about the service because it gives them an opportunity to reach the unbanked through their merchant partners. MTN is excited about the service because merchants in Ghana were early adopters of mobile technology, recognizing it as a profit-enhancing tool. Only time will tell if Ghanian consumers will embrace MTN’s Mobile Money as enthusiastically as East Africans have embraced M-Pesa.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

A few months back I wrote an article responding to people who were comparing the economy of SecondLife to that of developing countries like Burundi, Liberia, DRC and Zimbabwe. My argument was that there is simply no scarcity in a virtual world, making any comparison null and void. This article from VentureBeat echoes my point, that virtual economies simply defy the realities of real world economics.

According to the CIA World Factbook, as of 20 October 2008, SecondLife boasts a very loosely approximated GDP of $215 million per annum with a population averaging about 900,000 regular users (per month). Go back 60 days and the population is slightly higher at 1.2 million. This would put their GDP somewhere between $179 and $239 per capita. By other calculations the population of day-to-day users (people who’ve checked in in the last 14 days) is a more accurate measure and that would put the population at around 500,000 and the per capita GDP at a number closer to $430.

In other words, if SecondLife were a country it would be hovering at the bottom of the pyramid with other African nations like Liberia ($500 GDP), Burundi ($300 GDP), Congo DR ($300), and Zimbabwe ($200).

…

There simply is no scarcity in SecondLife. As long as people are playing it and they are spending more than they are earning as a whole, the system scales up. LindenLabs buys new servers and everyone (playing) wins. If SecondLife were ever to truly go into recession, it would mean the costs of operating the SL servers was higher than what the company was making from it’s users and growth would either be halted or you’d start to see in-game islands (which represent different servers in real life) start to disappear to recoup costs. If the real world were like SecondLife the United States would be considering deleting a few of it’s States right about now!

However, because SecondLife (and games like it) are completely controlled environments, if one wanted, they could introduce artificial scarcity, rules, governments etc. Has anyone experimented with a virtual ‘model’ of a developing country? Or perhaps even a whole continent like Africa? At the blog Alice and Kev, Robin Burkinshaw created a family of homeless Sims and proceeded to recount their tale of strife and struggle as a daily narrative…garnering compassion and empathy usually not even reserved for real homeless people!

Could recreating economies in Second Life that suffer some of the traits of developing countries (over population, job scarcity, corrupt leaders, weak economy, optimistic expats etc.) offer a way of studying development? Are there any groups out there experimenting with such a method? I did head over to SecondLife looking for anything remotely like this but only found people modeling tourist destinations and a few NGO virtual offices.

Photo: by damastarrostin used under the creative commons.

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

Bill Gates responds to the idea that ‘aid is bad’ in this interview with Newsweek. Although, he doesn’t reference Dambisa Moyo or or her book DEAD AID directly, some of his comments do make arguments against the meme (of aid doing more harm than good) while defending the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation approach to global development:

Of the countries that donors give aid to, there’s a number, like Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand, that have graduated, and what we’re left with is a very tough group. But health aid is probably the least controversial because it brings down population growth…A vaccine is not that attractive to a dictator. Even in the toughest countries–Congo, Somalia–vaccinations work. If you’re getting into building roads, you may have to stay away.

It speaks to our value of equality. It speaks to our belief that preserving the environment is important, by making sure there is not severe overpopulation. The tools that we have now are better than ever. Think of children’s lives saved, going from the 20 million that died per year in the 1960s to the fewer than 9 million today, to the goal of fewer than 5 million deaths within 15 years. That’s a pretty appealing story when you’re talking about a quarter of a percent of the federal budget.

Read the full interview…

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

AFRICAGIS is the premier conference and exhibition focusing on geo-information technologies and applications in Africa. The principal objective of AFRICAGIS is to provide a platform for geo-information professionals from Africa to learn about geo-information technology and its applications. It provides a forum for geo-information professionals to meet, interact, and be updated on new developments, products and emerging trends and issues.

The conference language is English with simultaneous translation into French of the plenary and some of the parallel sessions. There will be Keynote addresses, 20-minute paper presentations, followed by a 15-minute discussion and 60-minute facilitated general discussion at the end of each session. Poster sessions will be organized with flexibility to allow participants learn as much from the presenters in an environment as a ?market place?. (sic) There will also be ample space for exhibition by vendors and various organizations.

I didn’t have the opportunity to truly participate in the conference as I was only there for a day, but I did manage to catch a few brief talks and I visited the trade show tent for a brief cocktail reception. In terms of facilities, it doesn’t get more posh (at least not in Uganda) than the massive Speke Resort where this was held.

For instance, this room seems to have been completely reserved for laptop users and between session cross-talk.  (I nicknamed it the Twitter room.)

This shot only captures about a fourth of the space we were in.

As presentations were made, people typed away, often looking up the topics being discussed.

The Google booth. I arrived at the tent during lunch so no one was around.

The cocktail reception was a great place to decompress after a long day.

There many other companies were also represented like the GeoEye team.

The real inspiration here was that a tech event of this scale happened in Kampala, it’s a really good sign for the region. I think the fact that Google got more people on the ground was also significant. To often the people producing things for the African market have no context, or experience with how things operate here…at least not outside of the world of NGOs. The conference was a little long, a week probably could have been compressed to three days, giving international visitors more time to actually see the real city, the local university, and perhaps a few local businesses. And while it’s great to target NGOs, governments, educational institutions and charities, the local private sector was almost completely ignored. However, hopefully this was was just the beginning of more interaction corporations that offer these services and the local development scene.

I should mention however, that the independently organized Wherecamp on Friday, will address this very oversight in typical ad-hoc fashion.

http://www.africagis2009.org/

http://google-africa.blogspot.com/

http://sites.google.com/a/earthoutreach.org/kampala/

© 2008 - 2009 Appfrica International. Looking for more African tech? Try our podcast Appfricast which you can also find on iTunes.

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