China Sets Sights on Dominating Global Smartphone Market

The rise of smartphones – mobile phones capable of Internet access and able to run ‘apps’ or applications – is the latest wave of the global connectivity revolution. Mobile phones rapidly made their way around the world to become almost ubiquitous – the most successful take-up of a piece of communications technology in history – and now smartphones are set to do the same. The number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world surpassed 6 billion in 2012 (out of a population of 7 billion) and, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the number of mobile phones will exceed the world’s population by 2014.

Over the last five years, with the increasing popularity of smartphones, the focus of the mobile industry has shifted from voice and messaging to apps and data services.

Smartphones are complex pieces of technology and any country that can develop the capability to make them and innovate is set to make a lot of money.

The high export value potential of designing and making “computer equipment, office equipment, telecommunication equipment, electric circuit equipment, and valves and transistors” was flagged up as a priority for developing nations back in 2005 at a UN meeting looking for “New and Dynamic Sectors of World Trade” (UNCTAD).

At present, smartphones have a long way to go to surpass old-style mobile phones: by the end of 2016, according to Portio Research (portioresearch.com), the number of non-smartphones in the Asia-Pacific region alone will still be bigger than the entire worldwide number of all smartphones. Even so, it’s predicted that by 2016, there will be 555 million active smartphones in China alone, as well as half a billion smartphones in Europe by the end of 2014. By 2013, North America’s smartphones will make up 50 per cent of all mobile phones. All in all, a lucrative market.

The main factor holding back the rise of smartphones is price. Smartphones tend to cost more than a basic mobile phone. But as China gets more heavily involved in the smartphone marketplace with its own smartphone and mobile phone brands, low income consumers will find themselves with a wider choice of affordable and powerful smartphones, each one a mini-computer.

Out of the 10 largest global manufacturers of smartphones, four are Chinese: Lenovo, Yulong, Huawei and ZTE (Gartner).

Huawei (http://www.huawei.com/en/), the world’s biggest smartphone seller (according to research firm Canalys) (canalys.com), has started to move some of its design team to London in the United Kingdom, to better tailor its products for foreign markets. It has revenues each year of US $35 billion.

China’s mobile phone market is vast, accounting for a third of all smartphones sold in the world. Getting a foothold in this marketplace places a company in a very strong position to build the expertise and capital to push into the wider global marketplace. And that is what Chinese brands are starting to do. So far, Chinese exports of branded smartphones make up a fifth of those sold around the world (Canalys).

The big global competitors to date have been South Korea’s Samsung (samsung.com) and the American Apple brand (apple.com). Other large competitors are Canada’s troubled Blackberry and Finland’s Nokia.

To compete with them, popular and successful Chinese brands include Xiaomi (xiaomi.cn), which sells more mobile phones in China than does the American Apple brand, and ZTE (http://wwwen.zte.com.cn/en/).

For years, many of the top global brands have had their phones and the components manufactured in China. This meant Chinese manufacturers were assembling the phones but not benefiting from the high value that can be extracted from being the owner of the brand name and the originator of the innovation and holder of the copyrights and trademarks.

But now China’s Lenovo brand (http://www.lenovo.com/uk/en/), for example, has successfully pulled past U.S. electronics maker Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) to become the largest seller of personal computers in the world. It is also selling more mobile phones and tablet computers than personal computers.

Lenovo Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing espouses a two-part strategy to defend market share at home in China while going hard at overseas markets. Lenovo started with so-called emerging markets in Russia, India and Indonesia.

“We have very aggressive plans to explore overseas markets,” Lenovo’s mobile phone division head Liu Jun told China Daily. “We hope the overseas market will contribute more than half of Lenovo’s total smartphone revenue in the long run.”

Xiaomi founder Lei Jun is considered part of a new generation of dynamic Chinese technology leaders. His casual clothing and charismatic public presentations have had some equate him to the late Apple founder Steve Jobs. But Jun is not happy with selling smartphones and instead sees the company’s future in software and that the phones are just a tool to access the software. Xiaomi hopes to make even more money from selling games, running online marketplaces and offering social media.

The Chinese-made smartphone brand Coolpad (http://coolpadamericas.com/) – made by Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific Co. – is the third best-selling in the Chinese marketplace, surpassing Huawei and Apple and has global annual revenue of US $1.8 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Sino Market Research found 10.2 per cent of China’s smartphone users own a Coolpad, behind Korean brand Samsung and China’s Lenovo.

Coolpad has succeeded by investing heavily in research and development (R&D) and innovation to make the phones cheap but also powerful.

Innovations include technology that lets users have more than one phone number for the same phone by being able to connect to two different network technologies. The phones also include security and privacy protections that make them popular with businesspeople and government officials.

The Coolpad brand has also been frenetic in launching different models of the phones to appeal to its customers. In 2012, it launched 48 different models, selling for between US $50 and US $500.

Coolpad was launched in 2012 in the US as part of the company’s global expansion plans.

China has placed innovation at the core of its economic development policies. China increased its R&D spending in 2009 to US $25.7 billion, a 25.6 per cent rise over 2008, according to Du Zhanyuan, vice minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology. In 2011, China surpassed South Korea and Europe in total patents filed and was in a neck-and-neck race with Japan and the United States.

China now boasts twice as many Internet users as the United States, and is the main global maker of computers and consumer electronics, from toys to games consoles to digital everything.

China is also on course to become the world’s largest market for Internet commerce and computing.

The drive to change and transform China’s global economic role was promoted in 2011’s Beijing International Design Week (http://www.bjdw.org/en/), with its theme of transforming “Made in China to Designed in China.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 2013

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Update: Huawei Loses Millions Of Users As Serious New Threat From China Gets Real

"Make no mistake—Xiaomi intends to entice Huawei consumers with upgraded phones such as the recent Mi 10 Pro, better able to compete with Huawei’s flagships in overseas markets. The company is also making a feature of its “easy access to Google,” as its marketing goes head to head with its larger Chinese rival. Right now, Xiaomi has a unique opportunity to strip away market share with Huawei helpless on the Google front. And it seems that millions of Huawei users outside China who want to maintain Google on their phones are already voting with their wallets."

Mobile Phone Microscopes to Revolutionize Health Diagnostics

 

Mobile phone usage has increased hugely across the global South in the past five years. In Africa, the number of mobile phone subscribers reached 545 million in 2013, while there are 3.5 billion mobile phone users in Asia and the Pacific (ITU). Some 93 million people in Africa and 895 million in Asia and the Pacific have mobile phone Internet access (ITU).

“Every day we are moving closer to having almost as many mobile-cellular subscriptions as people on earth,” Brahima Sanou, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau, wrote in its latest report on their growth.

The number of mobile phone subscriptions in the developing world has surpassed 5 billion and the number in the world as a whole reached 6.8 billion in 2013 (ITU), out of a world population of more than 7.1 billion. This compares to considerably lower numbers of people with access to the Internet: 2.7 billion in the world (ITU).

While many people in poorer countries have basic versions of mobile phones, the next generation of smartphones has been growing in number as prices come down (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone). Examples of these smart phones include the BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy, and the Nokia Lumia. Smartphones tend to have enormous computing power and an ability to run complex ‘apps’ or applications – including public transport options, maps, restaurant and store locators, banking services and market information and resources. They can also access the Internet through Wi-Fi, and have camera and video capability.

What people can do with these feature-packed phones is limited by little other than human imagination. With the ability to store large amounts of data and images, using apps that perform a limitless range of services and tasks, smartphones can be deployed as powerful tools to tackle problems.

Science fiction sagas have long fantasized about people being able to walk around with small electronic devices that can do immensely powerful tasks, including being a medical diagnostic tool. But this science fiction dream is rapidly becoming reality in the global South.

Various initiatives and innovators are using mobile phones and smartphones to conduct medical diagnosis and gather data for medical studies in real time.

Some innovations are even turning smartphones into mobile microscopes.

Developed by the University of California, Berkeley in the lab of Professor Daniel Fletcher (http://cellscope.berkeley.edu/), the CellScope (cellscope.com) is capable of turning the camera on a cell (mobile) phone into a diagnostic microscope with a magnification of 5x to 60x. Fletcher’s lab has also pioneered work on needle-free injection technology.

The CellScope can be used for ocular imaging (technologies for visualizing and assessing a range of diseases of the eye) and for detecting tuberculosis, blood-borne diseases and parasitic worms.

Fletcher is a bioengineer and was impressed with how much mobile phone technology has proliferated across the global South.

“You don’t have to put in these copper wires (for phone lines) anymore; you have the (cell) towers. It’s big business,” Fletcher told The Scientist Magazine.

“It’s leaping over the need for infrastructure.”

Fletcher and his colleagues experimented by attaching extra lenses to smartphones. They then used the phone to image cells that had been stained with fluorescent dyes to make them easier to see. The quality of the image was so good, they were able to diagnose malaria from blood samples and tuberculosis from sputum (spit) samples.

With the addition of image analyzing software, the phone was able to automatically count the number of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli. They were trying to prove you did not need conventional microscopes to do this sort of diagnostic work.

Fletcher and his colleagues are currently trialling the technology in Vietnam, India, Cameroon and Thailand.

“Technology alone doesn’t create effective health care,” Fletcher emphasizes. “It’s got to be part of a context in which the information is captured and validated and is analyzed in the right way, and treatments are then available in response to information.”

Another group from Toronto General Hospital in Canada (http://www.uhn.ca/corporate/AboutUHN/OurHospitals/Pages/TGH.aspx) has ‘hacked’ an iPhone smartphone by placing a 1 millimeter ball lens on the phone’s camera. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist, had been investigating parasitic worm infections in children on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania. Along with Jason Andrews of Massachusetts General Hospital, they had been inspired by a report about how a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis had created a simple microscope out of an iPhone with a 1 millimeter lens. This makeshift microscope was used to take pictures of blood smears at a 350 times magnification and giving a 1.5 micron resolution.

“We thought that was a great idea,” Bogoch told The Scientist Magazine. Bogoch regularly works as part of an international team around the world, often in remote locations.

“We thought … we could take it to the field and see if it accurately works in a more real-world setting.”

Inspired, Bogoch got together with his colleagues and created a similar microscope with a 3 millimeter ball lens and then got to work using it to identify soil-transmitted helminth eggs in stool samples in Tanzania. When examining the stool samples of 199 children in a clinical trial using the makeshift microscope, they were able to accurately identify helminth infections in 70 per cent of the cases. They also found the iPhone microscope did very well at spotting eggs of particular parasites, such as 80 per cent of Ascaris lumbricoides infections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascaris_lumbricoides). The success rate dropped significantly, however, when trying to detect whipworm parasites (just over half) and hookworm infections (14 per cent).

But this is early days and an experiment: “Obviously the results aren’t perfect and there’s definitely room for improvement,” Bogoch admits.

What stands out is the potential to completely revolutionize health care by continuing to develop the capability of smartphones. With their portability and low cost, they also have the advantage of not needing a trained physician to operate them, according to David Walker, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, in The Scientist Magazine.

One of the many advantages of combining a microscope with a digital smartphone is the ability to take a picture and send it straight away to someone to make a diagnosis.

Even more exciting, Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu at the University of California, Davis (http://cbst.ucdavis.edu/people/sebastian/) is adapting mobile phones to undertake spectroscopy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy), using diagnostic test software to analyze samples on the spot. This, when successful, would be akin to the capabilities first mooted in the science fiction television and film series Star Trek (startrek.com). In Star Trek, the doctor is able to use a small handheld digital device to quickly diagnose what ails somebody.

The potential for this technology in the global South is significant. Aydogan Ozcan at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is also working on mobile phone microscopes, believes this is as significant as the dawn of the personal computer: “If you look at the early computers, they were bulky, they were extremely expensive,” he says.

But now computers “are portable … and almost anyone can afford them. The same thing is going on today (with microscopy). We are miniaturizing our micro- and nano-analysis tools. We’re making them more affordable; we’re making them more powerful.”

It looks like this science fiction dream will soon become today’s reality.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 2013

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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New Kenyan Services to Innovate Mobile Health and Farming

 

Kenya is home to a vibrant innovation culture centred around mobile phones. While not all the services launched will be successful, the flurry of start-ups shows the country has the right combination of technical skills, bright ideas and cash to make a go of new services.

With the number of mobile phone users leaping 28 per cent in 2011, to reach 25 million subscribers out of a population of 39 million (Reuters), the country has a large market for mobile phone-based services. Kenya also has 10 million people with access to the Internet, up from 4 million in 2009.

Two issues critical to the well-being of Kenyans – health services and farming – are being tackled by new mobile phone services. One is a service being run and marketed by a major player in the market, and the other, by a small start-up.

Statistics indicate that in Kenya, one doctor attends to over 10,000 patients. The World Health Organization recommends a ratio of 1:600. There are just over 7,500 licensed medical facilities in the country.

Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecoms operator, is trying to take the pressure off overstretched medical and health systems with a new mobile health service. Its 24-hour health advice and referral service is called ‘Daktari 1525’ and lets people call and speak with a doctor or an expert to get advice on any health issue. The number 1525 refers to the dialling code which links users directly to the Safaricom call centre. Daktari 1525 is available to the 18 million Safaricom subscribers.

Safaricom has partnered with ‘Call-a-Doc’ to launch the tool. The new service hopes to relieve outpatient departments in government hospitals and health facilities with its advice and referrals. The Daktari 1525 service does not prescribe a treatment to the callers, avoiding the legal risks of remote diagnosis.

It also offers home remedies and health tips on healthy lifestyles. In an emergency, users can also dial Daktari 1525 if there is Safaricom network coverage.

The partnership is divided between Safaricom and Call-a-Doc. Safaricom handles all the mobile phone network infrastructure, the call centre facility and the marketing of the service. Call-a-Doc takes care of recruiting doctors.

But how does the service use the doctors’ time well? The shifts are designed to surge the number of doctors to 15 during peak times, falling to as few as four doctors during off-peak times. The doctors work on a part-time basis and there are currently 50 employed by the service.

Not everyone is convinced the service will work.

“It is a good attempt to venture into the field; however we would like to caution the practitioners involved that they must remain ethical and must at all times uphold professional confidentiality,” Medical Practitioners and Dentist Board Chief Executive Officer Daniel Yumbya told Capital News.

Another new service based in the capital, Nairobi, is trying to shake up the world of farming. Its new mobile phone service, “MFarm: connecting farmers” (http://mfarm.co.ke/) calls itself “a transparency tool for Kenyan farmers”.

It bills itself as a “factory of ideas” looking to find “creative agribusiness solutions.” The service is a paid-for web platform that helps farmers keep track of prices in the capital, Nairobi, and claims to have signed up 3,000 farmers in the first year of operations.

The service offers crop prices by sending a text to the numbers 3535 if the user gives the crop location required. As an example, the user texts “price crop location” “price maize Nairobi”. Users can also sell their crops, or buy farm supplies.

It also allows farmers to group sell their crops by getting together with other small-scale farmers. This is a crucial service because it allows the smaller farmer to sell into the wholesale markets where prices are better. Farmers can also group buy, benefiting from lower prices by buying bulk from suppliers. It cleverly offers several ‘plans’ to suit budgets. There is an ‘Eco Plan’ at the low end, a mid-range ‘Pro Plan’, and a bells-and-whistles option, ‘Biz Plan’.

The service also benefits from its connections with iHub Nairobi (http://ihub.co.ke/pages/home.php), the buzzing “open space for technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in Nairobi.” It provides a strong support network to turn to when problems arise.

It seems as if it would be a mistake to enter the African market with any new tech solution without first checking out the scene in Nairobi.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2012

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Data Surge across Global South Promises to Re-shape the Internet

The deluge of data gathered by the digital revolution underway in the global South continues to offer a significant economic opportunity. How this data is harvested will forge the successful Internet business models of the future.

As the Internet spreads its way further across the global South, many are forecasting this new surge in web users and the data they generate will radically reshape the way people engage with and use the Internet. Unlike previous generations of web users, most of these new users will be accessing the Internet primarily with mobile phones and other devices, rather than computers. Many will not be native English speakers.

Argentinian philosopher and digital publisher Octavio Kulesz says “the digital experiences undertaken in the South suggest that new technologies represent a great opportunity for developing countries … but on the condition that local entrepreneurs seek out original models adapted to the concrete needs of their communities.”

In a report for the International Alliance of Independent Publishers, Kulesz said we “must ask ourselves how useful it would be to reproduce the prototypes from the North in the South.”

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast (2010-2015), by 2015, there will be 3 billion Internet users in the world: 40 percent of the global population. Internet Protocol (IP) traffic is growing fastest in Latin America, where it is forecast to grow by 50 percent from 2010 to 2015. Next are the Middle East and Africa.

There are already as many networked devices – tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and smart machines – on the planet as people. By 2015 – the year of the Millennium Development Goals (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals) – they’ll outnumber people by two to one.

The potential of the Internet revolution is especially compelling in Africa, a continent neglected for so long in the global communications revolution. The 10,000 kilometre-long East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), connecting sub-Saharan Africa with Europe and Asia, has joined other cables from the continent. Gradually, the infrastructure is coming in to place to connect Africa properly to the world.

The first batch of Internet users came from the United States, home of the Internet which grew out of the US military’s Arpanet system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET). This first wave of the Internet’s history was very much an American phenomenon. The priorities and content of the web were driven by the cultural and economic concerns of its American users. And the big brands of today’s web reflect this: Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo, WordPress, to name a few.

As the web expanded across wealthy, developed nations in Europe, users mostly mimicked the priorities of the American approach, using the web to express themselves, be entertained, share files, access government services and sell and market products and services.

But the spread of the Internet across the global South is already showing itself to have a different character and set of priorities. One change is in the way people are accessing the web: through mobile phones and other devices, rather than through laptops and personal computers.

In the future, the trend is towards a global mobile world, in which the communications medium will favour video and audio over text, according to Fast Company magazine (http://www.fastcompany.com). Information is being shared across boundaries on a vast scale for the first time. People around the world are gaining access to data and information never available before, and all of it is nearly instantaneous.

Kulesz said countries of the South face a profound and difficult decision: follow the lead taken by the technology pioneers of the South, or try and replicate what was done in the North?

“Sooner or later, these countries will have to ask themselves what kind of digital publishing highways they must build,” his report said, “and they will be faced with two very different options: a) financing the installation of platforms designed in the North; b) investing according to the concrete needs, expectations and potentialities of local authors, readers and entrepreneurs. Whatever the decision of each country may be, the long-term impact will be immense.”

The costs of trying to replicate the technological infrastructure of the North makes little sense, when it is technologically possible to bypass this costly infrastructure with even newer work-arounds.

“Of course, it would be extraordinary to obtain 80 percent Internet penetration in Africa or make huge investments in infrastructure throughout the developing regions,” continues Kulesz, “but that may never happen. And in the event that it does occur some day, by then the industrialized countries will no doubt have made another technological leap, meaning that the disparity in infrastructure would still persist. So the most effective option is to start working right now, with what is available.”

New global magazine Southern Innovator (http://www.scribd.com/doc/57980406/Southern-Innovator-Issue-1), published by UNDP’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation, captures how this process is happening, as the people of the global South re-shape the Internet to be their own and to meet their needs.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Mobile Applications Market: Opportunities for South

As the number of mobile phone users around the world mushrooms, so does the mobile phone applications market. Revenue from downloads of applications, or apps, topped US $10 billion in 2009, according to market analyst firm Juniper (http://juniperresearch.com).

Applications have two distinct advantages for the poor in the South. Apps targeted at the poor can boost incomes and increase health and education. And they are an emerging way to make money.

Somebody who develops an application can expect to make up to 70 percent of the download cost. Apple (http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone) – owner of the iPhone application store – claims it has already given developers over US $1 billion in revenues.

It is a growing industry. The market-leading Apple App Store now boasts more than 225,000 applications for download and sale. It says they have been downloaded an impressive 5 billion times.

Android Market (http://www.android.com/market/#app=com.com2us.HG), run by the search engine Google, has more than 60,000 apps on offer. GetJar (www.getjar.com), an independent mobile phone application store from Sweden, says it has 72,000 apps available and has had 1 billion downloads.

Now that the apps economy has been running for a couple years, it is possible to divine what increases a developer’s success. Some believe the apps marketplace mimics the dynamics of the music business, rather than the traditional software business.

GetJar chief executive Ilja Laurs told the Economist that it takes as long to write an app as a song. Apps on average cost about the same as a music download: US $1.90. And just like the pop music charts, a few become big hits but most never make it. Apps are also a quick hit: even after becoming successful they can quickly fade back to obscurity again. In short, they are fad and trend driven and are very much about the moment and a current need.

That means they are wide open to newcomers from the South.

With mobile phones now the main channel for information in East Africa, for example, and mobile penetration exceeding 40 percent of the population there, vast markets have opened for apps. East Africa has more than 120 million citizens, with a large majority living in rural areas: many needing poverty-fighting apps to change their lives.

Various new applications show the creative thinking already coming out of the South. South Africa’s Afridoctor (www.afridoctor.com) is Africa’s first personal mobile health clinic. Users submit photos of ailments and receive advice from a panel of professionals, or use the mapping feature to find doctors, clinics and all health industry related services nearby. The emergency feature notifies next of kin of your distress and location. Features include symptom checkers, first-aid information, health calculators and quizzes. Afridoctor hopes to make health care affordable and accessible to Africans. It is made by 24.com (http://store.ovi.com/publisher/24.com), South Africa’s largest digital brands group.

In Mexico, the tragedy of migrants dying as they try to cross the border to the United States is being addressed by Mexican professor Ricardo Dominguez, with funding from charities. He has developed an app tool to help people who cross the US-Mexico border find drinking water in the desert, churches with shelter, and human right groups offering them help. Immigrants download the app – being called a “platform for Migrant Border” – onto their mobile phones.

“The purpose is to provide a platform to travel safely through the desert,” said Dominguez, who led the design team.

App action has heated up in India, where Spice Mobiles (http://www.spiceglobal.com/SpiceMobiles/SpiceMobiles.aspx) – a wing of the Spice Group – is launching an application store with 250 content providers. India’s Bharti Airtel launched its first home-grown mobile application store in February of this year – Airtel App Central (http://www.airtel.in/apps). It clocked up over 13 million downloads in four months.

India’s Reliance Communications (http://www.rcom.co.in/Rcom/personal/home/index.html) also launched an application called Socially. It has been designed to enable users to follow the recent activity of friends, and also allows the user to update their status on different social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn through a single client.

Jon Gosier, from Appfrica Labs (http://appfrica.net/blog) – behind the highly successful crisis crowdsourcing Ushahidi application (http://www.ushahidi.com) – explained the thinking behind apps in Africa:

“Our goal is to show the world that Africa is capable of solving some of its own problems,” he told CP-Africa.com. “Too often Africans aren’t even considered as a resource when discussing how to improve their own quality of life.”

He has the following advice for would-be app developers: “Think global. Too many entrepreneurs here (Africa) think of themselves as competing with peers within their school or country. That’s not true. You’re competing in the global market now. If your website or web app doesn’t look as flashy or polished as the stuff from 37 Signals (www.37signals.com) or Carsonified (www.carsonified.com), you’ve still got work to do.

“You don’t get a pass on the web because you’re African. You get the challenge of working harder.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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