East Africa to get its First Dedicated Technology City

An ambitious scheme is underway to create a vast technology city on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.

With information technology proliferating across Africa after decades of stagnation and underinvestment, a host of exciting new technologies have had to exist within structures not built for the 21st century.

One attempt to change things is Konza Technology City (konzacity.co.ke), an ambitious project that aims to build the infrastructure to host the companies of the 21st century for Kenya and East Africa. Konza Technology City joins a growing network of technology cities and parks across the global South. If the links between these centres of technological innovation and smart thinking can be strengthened, they have the potential to contribute to exceptional gains in human development.

Konza Technology City will be built on 5,000 acres (2,023 hectares) of land 60 kilometres south of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

The lead agency on the US $10 billion project is the Ministry of Information and Communication (http://www.information.go.ke/). The Kenyan government is seeking partners and investors to help with funding the project, whose components include a business process outsourcing (BPO) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_outsourcing) zone – where specific business functions are contracted to third party providers. There is also a financial district and a commercial district with office space.

This will be combined with the other side of Konza: hotels, hospitals, a sports stadium and other support services necessary to support a city. The idea is to develop the site over a period of 20 years, with the BPO and IT Educational and Science Park taking up 23 per cent of the site.

Kenya plans to expand its business process outsourcing sector and has been hosting conferences in Europe to gather the best advice. The sector has experienced double-digit growth in the past three years, rising on the increasing capacity brought by new undersea cables like TEAMs, Seacom and EASSy.

The idea is to put in place the building blocks of a 21st century Kenya and to become the leading hub for the whole of East Africa. Kenya has an ambitious plan to become a middle-income country by 2030 (http://www.vision2030.go.ke/).

There is scepticism about large projects in Kenya, with some fearing they will be abandoned before they are finished. But it does seem this project has galvanized a wide community of support. According to IT Web’s (http://www.itweb.co.za/) Ken Macharia, opponents of the project make various arguments. People in the information and communication technologies sector would like to see greater local capacity in place before such massive investment in buildings goes ahead. Others oppose the idea of having a planned city and would like to see things evolve organically. Still others question the government’s capacity to undertake such an ambitious scheme.

According to Macharia, the ‘if you build it, they will come’ argument is winning the day. The scope and ambition of the project has both excited many players within and outside government and focused their efforts.

Macharia even believes the public sector is way ahead of the private sector.

“The government is light years ahead in terms of the vision and drive of developing the ICT sector in the country, while the private sector is trying to catch up,” he said.

Kenya will become the first country in the region to build a technology city. It can look to China for some examples. One is Shenzhen City and its Science and Technology Park (http://www.ship.gov.cn/en/index.asp?bianhao=20). Or Cairo, Egypt’s Smart Village (http://www.smart-villages.com/).

Macharia also says the focus solely on technology is missing the bigger impact Konza can have.

“The city’s concept has financial, educational, commercial and industrial implications, which have not been sold as aggressively as the tech aspect has. Perhaps the better name for the proposed city would be Konza Special Economic Zone, where the key pillars mutually benefit from each other’s presence. Technology, after all, is a means to an end, not the end itself.”

The timing for a place like Konza City is excellent: undersea cables are being placed around and to Africa. The continent was notorious for being the most underserved continent on the planet and is in a furious transition from this information technology wasteland to a potential oasis of prosperity.

The undersea cable projects are promising a bandwidth explosion for the continent of Africa. The WACS cable (http://wacscable.com/index.jsp) is being put in place to link South Africa and Britain, and is due to be completed in 2012. It runs up the West Coast of Africa and will become the first direct connection to the undersea cable network for Namibia, the Congo and Togo.

It will increase South Africa’s bandwidth by an estimated 23 per cent.

Various technology investors, including the search engine giant Google, are also planning to build an undersea cable linking the so-called BRICS countries by 2014 – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The cable will also link them all to the United States. The technology group i3 Africa is leading the project (http://www.i3-mea.com/africa/), which should open up 21 additional African countries to the world’s undersea cable network.

Konza Technology City could make Kenya a significant beneficiary of all this new connectivity and bandwidth.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 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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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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Wireless Internet Culture Helping Zimbabwe Economy Recover

Zimbabwe’s turbulent descent into hyperinflation at the beginning of the 2000s – and the food crisis it caused as prices soared and purchasing power shrank – captured the world’s attention. From refugees fleeing the country to widespread hunger and poverty, the impact of hyperinflation was stark and distressing. Since the country’s economy stabilized in 2009, various signals are showing that Zimbabwe is slowly making its way back to growth and stability.

The scale of the hyperinflation is summed up by Zimbabwe’s eye-popping inflation rate. By December 2008, inflation was estimated at 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion percent (or 65 followed by 107 zeros — 65 million googol) (Forbes Asia).

One recovery strategy is emerging in Zimbabwe’s booming eating and drinking establishments. It seems the urge to socialize and network has become the source of economic vitality where so much else has been damaged.

The proliferation of coffee shops with wi-fi (wireless internet access) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi) has spawned a new, connected business culture that is flexible and entrepreneurial.

Zimbabwe’s unity government was formed in September 2008. By the beginning of 2009, the government relented on the crippling hyperinflation and allowed business to be conducted in the US dollar. This made it possible to save again and do business with greater predictability. At this time, the country had the world’s highest inflation rate and the central bank printed a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar note.

The economic result of greater stability has been new shopping malls opening and a boom in new eating and drinking establishments.

During the hyperinflation, eating out was the last thing on most people’s minds. Just surviving was the paramount daily task.

In the capital, Harare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harare), the shopping mall Sam Levy’s Village (http://samlevysvillage.com), in the prosperous Borrowdale area of the northern suburbs, is full of thriving coffee shops, restaurants and pubs.

Outside of the wealthy enclaves, coffee shops have sprung up in the city’s art gallery, in sports clubs and a local supermarket chain.

While the coffees are still expensive relative to local wages, the Zimbabwe Online Hotspots (ZOL) (http://www.zol.co.zw) in the coffee shops have proved a big attraction. Most people in Zimbabwe have unreliable or non-existent electricity or, if lucky, poor-quality phone and internet dial-up in their homes.

ZOL Hotspots typically offer the first half hour of internet use for free. To surf longer, users must buy a voucher.

The damage done to the economy from hyperinflation and the political crisis means the country is still on the mend. But people have now resorted to what they call “networking,” according to Bryony Rheam in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. The functioning economy is all about making deals. And coffee shops with wi-fi are the perfect place to meet with a potential business partner.

But while the coffee shops are buzzing with people doing business, the proprietors still need to work out how to make better profits. Sales are still poor as people are mostly fixated on the wi-fi. One owner told the Telegraph: “We need to start charging people who sit here all day surfing the net.”

It is the restaurants who seem to be enjoying the boost in incomes and better spirits after the economic troubles. Zimbabwe’s black middle class are enjoying big occasions and celebrating with friends and family in restaurants.

“We went without for so long, that a lot of people almost see it as their right to spend money on eating out,” one patron told the Telegraph.

More good news has come from outside investors as well: Amstel Securities NV (http://www.amstelsec.com), based in Amsterdam, Netherlands calls Zimbabwe’s economy “the final frontier market in Africa”. It believes the country has the potential to grow its GDP (gross domestic product) to US $12 billion by 2015. The International Monetary Fund says the economy jumped from US $4.4 billion in 2009 to US $9 billion now.

In Amstel Securities’ report, it pegs the dollarization of the economy as the reason for stability: “These improvements have made Zimbabwe a much more vibrant economy with good further recovery potential.”

And these good vibes are contagious: it has been reported that the American hamburger chain McDonald’s is revisiting the idea of setting up in Zimbabwe. McDonald’s is currently present in a handful of African countries: South Africa has 132 restaurants.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 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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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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Crowdsourcing Mobile Phones to Make the Poor Money

 

The proliferation of mobile phones across the global South, reaching even the poorest places on the planet, has given birth to whole new ways of making money. A phenomenon called ‘crowdsourcing’ – in which the power of individuals is harvested to achieve a goal – is now being used to create networks of people earning extra income.

One technology called Txteagle (http://txteagle.com/index.html), works like this: somebody performs small tasks with their mobile phone, such as translating a document into a local language, and in return receives credits or cash, so-called ‘micro-payments.’ By having many people perform these tasks in their spare time or down time at work, a large project can be completed and people can top-up their income. The secret is that the task must be able to be broken up into bite size chunks: the elephant must be eaten with a small fork.

For the poor, or people who are just getting by in a poor country, this can be a much-needed survival top-up in hard economic times. It is also an opportunity for people normally frozen out of formal employment opportunities or living in slum conditions.

Txteagle is being pioneered in Kenya using text messages or a low bandwidth, interactive protocol known as USSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSD) (usually used to check prepaid phone balances).

The rapid growth in take-up has made mobile phones the big success story of the 21st century. With such reach, finding new applications for mobile phones that are relevant to the world’s poor and to developing countries is a huge growth area. It is estimated that by 2015, the global mobile phone content market could be worth over US $1 trillion: relegating basic voice phone calls to just 10 percent of the way people use mobile phones.

The technological success story of mobile phones is impressive: China is home to the same number of mobile-phone users (surpassing 650 million in 2009) as the whole of Europe. According to India’s telecoms regulator (http://www.trai.gov.in/Default.asp), half of all urban dwellers now have mobile – or fixed – telephone subscriptions and the number is growing by eight million a month. In Tanzania, mobile phone use grew by 1,600 percent between 2002 and 2008.

Txteagle is the brainchild of Nathan Eagle of EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles) (http://eprom.mit.edu/ ). He works on developing new mobile phone applications with computer science departments in 10 Sub-Saharan African countries including: the University of Nairobi (http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/) (Kenya), Makerere University (http://mak.ac.ug/makerere/) (Uganda), GSTIT (http://www.gstit.edu.et/) (Ethiopia), Ashesi University (http://www.ashesi.org/) (Ghana), and the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (http://www.kist.ac.rw/) (Rwanda).

Eagle has pioneered Txteagle in Nairobi, Kenya with students at the University of Nairobi. Drawing on his experience in East Africa, where he has lived since 2006, Eagle has a powerful message about mobile phones in the South. “This is their technology. The mobile phone is theirs,” he told a conference in March of this year. “It has had a far greater impact on their lives than it has on ours.”

Eagle says typical Txteagle users are “literate people in Nairobi who have significant idle time, like taxi drivers, security guards” or high school students. Like many Southern countries, Kenya has a plethora of languages: 62 in all. It can be laborious and costly to translate into all these languages. But by using crowd-sourcing on mobile phones, mobile phone company Nokia’s (www.nokia.com) phone menus have been translated into 15 local languages.

Already there are more people wanting to earn money this way than there are tasks to do. Eagle has had to cap payments at US $1.50 a day. The service needs to grow, and it is looking to offer people in the United States the opportunity to have easily broken-up tasks done in Kenya. Eagle believes his algorithms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm) ensure a 95-percent accuracy rate. One possible market is the US $15 billion medical transcription industry.

Kenya, a nation of 32 million, relies on its small business sector for most employment. In 2005, the government’s Economic Survey (www.cbs.go.ke/) found the small business sector created 437,900 jobs – mostly because of the boom in mobile phones. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), adding an additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people boosts a typical developing country’s GDP growth by 0.6 percent. The boost comes from the innovative use of mobile phone technology by local entrepreneurs.

Kenya is making significant headway on innovating with mobile phones. Already, 30 percent of Kenyans pay for their electricity with their mobile phones instead of waiting in line.

“We have transformed the majority of phones in East Africa into a platform that people can use to make money,” Eagle told the conference. “There are 15 million Africans ready to start working on their mobile phones.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 2009

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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Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_bgpEldq9JsC&dq=development+challenges+july+2009&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsjuly2009issue

Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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