The consumer technology boom is no longer restricted
to San Francisco. Monty Munford meets three African entrepreneurs who are
breaking boundaries across their continent
Old-timer: Businessman Tomi Davies has worked for FTSE 100 companies in the UK, the US and Africa, as well as developing the UK government's award-winning DirectGov website
Air stewardesses
in Addis Ababa are always happy to talk about their work for Ethiopian
Airlines. They tell of passengers who board the aircraft and ask, "Will
there be ANY food on the flight?", believing that the country's 1983-85
famine is a permanent feature of the country's existence.
Ethiopia is
actually a verdant and pastoral country, but such stories highlight the
misconceptions about Africa which persist in defining a continent.
Three decades on
and a lot has changed. Africa is continuing to throw off its post-colonial
cloak to become the world's fastest-growing group of economies.
The reason for
much of this explosive growth is the mobile phone and the internet. According
to analyst ABI, in 2012, 76.4 per cent of Africans owned a mobile phone. That's
821 million out of a population of more than a billion people; this mobile
penetration rate almost certainly surpassed 80 per cent in 2013.
This revolution
has created extraordinary things. In Kenya, a mobile money service set up in
2007, known as M-Pesa, accounted for more than 31 per cent of Kenya's GDP
across more than 19 million customers by 2012.
Somaliland is an
unrecognised (but democratic) country between Ethiopia and Somalia which has no
banks. It survives because of an international money wire service called
Dahabshiil which allows the global Somaliland diaspora to send money back to
the country. It also has crystal-clear mobile coverage and a buoyant mobile
sector of five operators.
Across the
continent in West Africa, the cities of Lagos in Nigeria and Accra in Ghana are
becoming mini-Silicon Valleys as, thanks to government support, clusters of
start-up tech companies are forming and are attracting big international
investment.
"Technology
has enabled a new generation of creators and innovators emerging from the
African continent to come up with inventive ideas that solve local
problems," says Rudy De Waele, CEO and co-founder of Nyota Media, an
agency for African entrepreneurs. "The tools to do so have never been more
accessible and low-cost in tech history and [they have] created new
possibilities for African talent to start any project of their dreams."
Africa has a long
way to go to change the minds and attitudes of those who worry about starving
on Ethiopian Airlines flights, but the notion of Africa as hungry is changing –
as not hungry for food, but hungry for success, as these three profiles prove.
Cities including Lagos in Nigeria (pictured) and Accra in Ghana are becoming mini-Silicon Valleys (Alamy)
Jason Bossman,
Ghana
Jason Bossman has
a great surname. As the founder of Ghanaian mobile ad start-up AdsBrook, it
might be handy when it comes to making deals.
His company is
based in the country's capital, Accra, but this is not Bossman's home town; he
didn't come to Ghana until he was in his late teens, after growing up in New
York.
When I met him at
a bar in Lagos last year, his stories of the mischief he got caught up in when
young perhaps vindicates his parents' decision to take the family back to the
homeland.
"My memories
of growing up in Harlem have grown fuzzy over time, but I distinctly remember a
few things from my childhood: the apartment buildings where we lived, blaring
music from street corners, facing-off with school bullies and other criminal
temptations.
"I have three
brothers and sisters and our parents tried to instil in us from a young age
good, solid, Christian values. The desire to bring up their kids with strong
African and Christian morals would have been seriously put to the test in that
particular environment – East Harlem in the late 1990s. I'm not surprised my
folks decided to move us back," he says.
It must have been
tough for a New York kid to leave his friends and > relocate at that age.
"When we arrived in our home country, the last thing I expected was that I
would grow to love the life I would eventually have over here. What did greet
me, though, was a big culture shock. As used as I was to the American – no, the
New York – way of living, I ruffled many feathers with my attitude, that to me
was normal, everyday stuff.
"It took up
to my second year of university for me to begin to appreciate the simplicity of
life in Ghana and to develop what was to later become the driving force to
build an advertising business through Ghana and across Africa," he says.
Bossman points to
Ghana's reputation as a politically stable country as a good place to do
business, but it is the strong investment support by entities such as the
Accra-based Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology that is just as
crucial.
They provided the
$45,000 (£27,335) in start-up seed financing that gave Bossman and AdsBrook the
boost needed to start a network of channels for advertisers to operate mobile
and online campaigns. Founded in early 2012, the company is already making a profit
and beginning to roll out outside Ghana.
"Starting a
business in Ghana is ideal for a start-up, because the country is well
connected to most of the key locations – but with all things being equal, good
start-up companies should be able to flourish anywhere.
"For me,
staying focused on the dream, and living that dream one day at a time, is
mostly what has helped me out of many a daunting situation. Like many other
entrepreneurs before us, we are simply trying to make a small piece of our
world better, hoping that eventually our pieces of the puzzle will come
together to make a whole," he says.
Hafiz Juma,
Tanzania
The AIM Group in
Tanzania was founded in Dar es Salaam by three siblings; Nadeem Juma, Shaista
Juma and Hafiz Juma. The company initially focused on infrastructure
deployments that made use of digital content such as interactive kiosks,
motion-controlled projections and installations. It is now involved in a number
of projects, including the Dar es Salaam International Academy and Efulusi
Africa, a research and development company for mobile payment solutions.
"We are
fifth-generation Tanzanians – we can trace our roots in the country to at least
1890," Juma tells me. "We are of Indian descent and make up a
minority of Indian Tanzanians, who have a complicated history in themselves.
Juma studied in
New York before co-founding Efulusi Africa in 2004, a company that deployed the
first mobile banking platform in Tanzania. Then, in 2011, he created the AIM
Group. In the past 18 months, the company has grown from a team of three to 25.
This success
apart, the tech environment in Tanzania is still emerging compared to its
neighbour, Kenya, which attracts money, investment and development by IT
behemoths such as IBM. The company's recent launch of IBM Research-Africa, in
Nairobi, is the company's 12th global laboratory and the first commercial
research lab on the continent.
Juma recognises
that Kenya is ahead of Tanzania in tech and economic development. "As a
Tanzanian, I probably shouldn't be saying this, but we definitely face stiff
competition from Kenya that has begun the process of creating a culture for
innovation. It also has a much more educated working population, so you will
often see Kenyans in management positions in Tanzania," he says.
But Tanzania is
also putting itself on the international stage through events such as the
highly influential TEDx talks that have proliferated around the world. Juma was
instrumental in setting up the first TEDxDar event in 2010. "It is one of
the most satisfying experiences I've ever had," he says.
"Economically,
Tanzania is in a transitional space. Like everywhere else on the continent we
are as caught up in the hype of 'Africa rising', it being the next hot-bed for
growth, the 'final frontier' and all the rest of the conventional rhetoric about
investment in the region," he concludes.
Tomi Davies,
Nigeria
Tomi Davies is an
old-timer. A businessman who has worked for FTSE 100 companies in the UK, the
US and Africa, as well as developing the UK government's award-winning
DirectGov website.
He commutes
between Lagos and London, and in Nigeria he sits on the board of some of its
biggest companies. He also led the Nigerian involvement in the One Laptop Per
Child (OLPC) initiative and invests in local start-ups.
"Nigeria has
160 million people with more than 100 million of them using mobile phones
daily," he tells me. "You can see the market potential here. You
cannot have a 100-million-device market with local demand that won't inspire
innovation," he says.
Davies became
interested in Nigeria when the military handed over power to the people in
1999, and he began a series of investments that began with comics, before
catching the mobile wave and moving on to seed investment for Nigerian
companies.
"About a
decade ago, just after Nigeria became a democratic country again, a South
African friend of mine came up with the idea of a fantasy football league
comic, called Supa Strikas." The idea later blossomed into an animated
series shown in 30 countries and by a Disney channel.
In 2012, Davies
was also one of the co-founders of the Lagos Angel Network that was set up to
provide availability of seed funding for local companies. A group of senior
industry executives now invest anything from £3,500-£35,000 into start-ups in
the Lagos area.
The network started
out with a quarterly Dragons' Den-style pitch event, and now meets monthly for
a dinner, during which companies make speed pitches and have the opportunity to
meet potential investors.
Davies is also
confident that the emerging Silicon Valley-style cluster of tech companies will
thrive with increased government support.
"Silicon
Lagoon [Lagos means lagoon] has just been given a boost by the state government
with a right-of-way grant to lay fibre all around the city. This project will
fuel an already indefatigable entrepreneurial tech environment," he says.
From Independent
