Global Voices Online (Cambridge)
Ethan Zuckerman
12 July 2007
guest column
Arusha — TED Africa - introducing Africa 2
Gabre-Madhin’s big bet
It’s morning in Arusha. The Sox and the A’s are still going at it in Oakland last night… which is to say, now… tied four-four. I’ll be watching the box score as the conference sessions start this morning.
I’ve already had one of the highlights of my day, the drive from Arusha to the conference center. The conference is held about 30km outside of the city at a golf resort (!) and lodge. On the way from near downtown Arusha, we pass by dozens of small shops, roadside nurseries, lush green fields. Kilimanjaro is shrouded by clouds, but there are numerous smaller hills int he foreground. We turn a corner and there’s a cataract of white water framed by two steep, green hills covered with vegetation. I want to get out and walk, and find myself thinking I could stay here for weeks, months, years enjoying the wet, cool lushness of the place. The drive is over too soon, and I’m sad I get only two more before heading south to Cape Town.
Boston loses 5-4. That’s a drag. But now we’re underway here at the second day of TED.
Eleni Gabre-Madhin is the founder of the first Ethiopian commodity exchange. She begins our morning talking about markets and choice. She notes that Bhutan has chosen to seek “gross national happiness” rather than gross national product - this is a choice. “Well functioning markets provide choices, opportunities to seek happiness.” Amartya Sen, who famously connected development and choice, discovered that famines are less about food supply and more about the inability to access food in the market.
This was true in the 1984 when famine wracked Ethiopia. There was a food surplus in the South of the country, but people in the North couldn’t access it. There are multiple reasons for this - poor road networks and poor market information were major forces. Across the board, African farmers face serious constraints - they use about 1/8th as much fertilizer as Asian farmers, less irrigation, lots fewer tractors. Their circumstances give them very little choice.
Nobel prize winner Theodore Schultz discovered farmers are poor, but rational economic actors - they are profit-minded and make choices designed to improve their lot. But despite market-based reforms, taking agricultural prices out of the hands of governments, we haven’t seen market rationalization in Africa. Instead, we see the most volotile market for farmers in the world. This is a result of high transaction costs, poor market information, few ways of connecting buyers and sellers, and problems with goods actually reaching the market.
Gabre-Madhin’s study of grain prices in Ethiopia suggests very closed markets - small networks of trust between buyers and sellers. Grain changes hands 4 to 5 times between producer and consumers, and changes sacks each time - this is the only way people know what they’re getting in terms of quantity and quality. This system is very vulnerable to price shocks. In 2001-2, Ethiopia had a bumper cross in maize. This depressed crop prices 80% and led some farmers to leave 300,000 tons of grain to rot in the fields. By July 2002, there was another major food crisis in Ethiopia with 14 million people facing food insecurity.
Gabre-Madhin left her job as a World Bank senior economist in Washington DC in part because she was disturbed by this 2002 famine. Her proposed solution - a commodity exchange, inspired by the Chicago mercantile exchange. She points out that the Chicago exchange historically functioned with farmers putting grain on barges and shipping that product to market - if grain prices dropped, barges would sometimes dump grain in Lake Michigan rather than pay the cost of returning goods to farmers. The key breakthrough for the Exchange was a certification system which allowed people to trade grain without physically delivering it - instead, they traded grain as much as 18 months ahead of time. This innovation helped establish Chicago as a trading superpower.
There’s huge growth in emerging market commodity exchanges. Exchanges in India have seen 270% annual growth. There’s tremendous potential for an exchange in Ethiopia, which is the largest grain producer in Africa, producing 30% more grain than South Africa. The exchange - EXEC (Ethiopia Commodity Exchange), launching in 8 months, integrates numerous facets of the agricultural market, simultaneously creating arbitration boards, market information systems, trading systems, rural access through VSAT-empowered data centers, warehouses, certification centers and exchange banks. The goal is to give farmers information on what’s most needed, as well as increased income… and ultimately, increased choice over their lives.
“If you make Africans rich, they’ll be less poor”
Pioneering African financier Idris Mohammed offers some diagnoses for the ills of Africa’s capital markets. His thesis: Africa has suffered from “abyssmal political leadership” and the fact that there has been very little “real capital that demands corporate returns on investment.”
“If you make Africans rich, they’ll be less poor. That’s my poverty reduction strategy.” Mohammed worries that African economics has overfocused on poverty reduction and underfocused on wealth creation. He points out that Africa is still the country with the lowest GDP, both on a regional and per capita basis. The continent - putting aside South Africa, “which is a developed country hiding out in Africa” producing 30% of the continent’s GDP - is in a pre-industrial state, with the highest sectoral economic contribution from agriculture.
Asia has outperformed Africa as a region over the past four decades - it’s only in the most recent decade that some nations, with 5% growth rates, are challenging Asian economies. This happens on a country by country basis as well, shown by a comparison of Nigeria and Indonesia, two large oil powers. “This story has occurred in an increasing aid environment.” While there’s been a great deal of aid, there are very low private investment levels, half of the level in all other regions. “Financing from debt, aid and natural resources - this is easy money.” There’s a need for more private capital, demanding higher rates of return.
While the political environment in Africa has been problematic - “We’ve had two kinds of leaders: morally bankrupt, and ideologically bankrupt” - the move towards democratization has been as rapid in Africa as in Asia, for the most part. We can’t just blame the political system.
The rise of mobile phones on the continent coincides with the rise in GDP per capita… and with a rise in investmen on the continent. MTN Nigeria was valued at $200 million some years ago when international investors began participating - it later sold for $5 billion, a dramatic increase. The next huge opportunity, Mohammed arguees, is power generation, lighting up the “dark continent”. Electricity consumption has been basically flat at 150 kilowatt hours per person per year. Asian consumption is about six times as high - American consumption is orders of magnitude higher. And industrialization requires energy. Investing in new power production historically costs about $1 million per megawat - this means that we might be talking about $70 billion in investment for the African continent. This is a huge amount of money, but not impossibly huge, especially in terms of telecoms investment.
Private equity financing is on the rise in Africa, representing $2 billion a year. The telecoms sector has been so successful, it’s starting to attract additional capital. “What I think Bono should be doing is telling the G8 to set up a fund of funds” to invest in new businesses in Africa. Beyond that. Mohammed wants to see a market capitalization ratio increase, which currently stands at 10% on the continent - raising this just 5% generates millions in new wealth.
“Dignity is more important than wealth”
Chris Anderson admits that it’s hard to be objective in introducing Jacqueline Novogratz, given that he lives with her. He frames her talk - about her history of working in Africa and founding the Acumen fund - in terms of love and anger: love of Africa, and anger at the simplistic way in which African issues are often discussed.
She starts by telling us about her rough introduction to Africa, as a young idealist armed with books of poetry and a guitar. In Cote d’Ivoire, determined to save the world starting with Africa. “I quickly discovered that Africans didn’t want saving, especially from me.”
Moving to Kigali, she learned more lessons rapidly. She began working with a bakery run by “prostitutes”. Working with the women in the bakery, she discovered that they were better described as “unwed mothers”, demonstrating that “what we call people can distance them from us”. But she also discovered that the “business” was really a charity. She helped the women learn to listen to the market and develop goods that people wanted to buy, like cassava and plantain chips. The women eventually earned four times the national average income.
This, in turn, required learning how to market - she tells of standing in the streets, selling doughnuts from an orange plastic bucket. The women she worked with pointed out “Who’s not going to buy doughnuts from a tall white woman?” In this case, she tried to force the women to listen to the market to create new products. But she says she also learned that, “When you live on charity, it is very hard to say what you need.” She observes, “Listening is not only about waiting, it’s about learning how better to ask questions.”
Offering some generalizations, she suggests:
- Dignity is more important that wealth
- Aid alone won’t work in developing Africa
- Markets alone also won’t solve these problems
Novogratz’s Acumen Fund is based around these principals - it’s a non-profit investment fund which raises money to invest in social-focused enterprise. It’s created 20,000 new jobs in 20 businesses, delivering services to tens of millions of people. She tells two stories about investments Acumen has made.
One is in a Kenyan company called Advanced Bioextracts in Kenya. They focus on growing a plant indigenous to China which produces the chemical Artemisenin, which is effective against malaria. Given that malaria leads to $10 billion in economic loss a year for Africa, this is a key area to focus on. Farmers producing, drying and selling artemisenin to Novartis are making 4 to 5 times what they would make from producing maize. While the company has been hugely successful, they’ve also had difficult times financially, and Acumen has provided two rounds of bridge financing to keep the company alive.
Another investment is in A to Z Manufacturing, an outgrowth of Sumitomo, which began creating bednets from polyethelene fiber impregnating with insecticide. They were initially produced only in East Asia - the company is an experiment in producing these products in Africa for African markets. The factory, near Arusha, now produces 8 millin nets a year, employing 5000 people, 90% of them female.
The business isn’t sustainable - it sells all its output to UN agencies, and if UNICEF or others decide to stop focusing on malaria, they’ll be in deep trouble. There are now experiments with selling directly to the end users. The nets cost $6 to manufacture and an additional $6 to distribute - market tests have discovered that people will pay $1 for the nets, but not much more. Do you give these nets away, or do you sell them for $1, a highly subsidized price? These are the questions Acumen is wrestling with, trying to use a combination of market and charitable mechanisms to effect change.
The Cheetah Generation faces “the blind leading the clueless”
Emeka Okafor introduces Ghanaian economist George Ayittey as the inspiration for his blogging career, especially for the creation of his Africa Unchained blog, named after one of Ayittey’s books. Ayittey, Okafor notes, has a reputation as a troublemaker, and he strides onto stage asking, “Do you think Africans would put together a conference like this? The AU? They’d still be asking for foreign aid.”
Ayittey characterizes several of the conference speakers as “the cheetah generation”, fast-moving people who don’t accept corruption, and who demand that democracy and transparency lead to better governance. “Africa’s salvation rests on the back of these cheetahs.” He constrasts them to “the hippo generation”, the ruling elites, stuck in their intellectual patch, complaining about colonialism and imperialism. “They won’t reform, because they benefit from the status quo.” Ayittey acknowledges his anger at a continent that’s so rich in natural resources and so poor in material terms.
“An enduring tragecy is that so many people, governments and organizations want to help the people in Africa, who they don’t understand.” As a result, “helping Africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd, where the blind are leading the clueless.” It’s unclear whether well meaning folks like Bono are blind or clueless in this description, but Ayittey reminds us “Africa’s begging bowl leaks,” and that it would be absurd to pour more money into it, given that corruption costs more than $180 billion a year, and that $80 billion a year of capital flees from the continent.
In the next chapter of Africa’s development, he tells us that we have to ask “Who do we want to help in Africa - the people, or the leaders?” He’s asked friends who are expert on Africa to name as many post-colonial African leaders as they can from the 204 leaders the continent has seen. Most can’t come up with more than 15, and that list includes figures like Idi Amin. This is because most African leaders have failed us: they include “post-military fufuheads and Swiss bank socialists”. They are a far cry from the leadership the continent has known for centuries, traditional leaders who were constrained by councils of elders, not “vampire states” that suck the life from their people.
Development of Africa has overfocused on the “modern sector” - which is generally corrupt and broken - and underfocused on the informal and traditional sectors, which is where most Africans actually work. These sectors, especially the agricultural sector, are based around communal ownership and decision-making. But they’re not socialist - they’re deeply market-based and, in West Africa, based around entrepreneurial women. it wasn’t until post-colonialism that governments declared markets to be “imperialistic” - markets aren’t alien to Africa, which is based around “a different form of capitalism”.
Showing the sorts of enterprise he believes Africa needs to encourage, Ayittey shows us a video of Ghanaian fishermen. They receive no government subsidy, they produce wealth based on what they’re able to catch, and they invest in their boats and other infrastructure, creating jobs for hundreds of others. This sort of entrepreneurship needs to be a focus for African growth if we are to “take back the Continent one village at a time.”
Dynamism, cities and waste
Iviorian architect Issa Diabate is interested in the interface between the indigenous and the classical, especially from the perspective of the African city. He sees cities as developing organically, as gatherings of energy and negotiations of space. He shows a wonderful sketch of a fantasy version of Lagos, a grid of organic-looking buildings which an architect dreamed of two decades ago. It looks nothing like Lagos, but it somehow captures the energy and intensity of the city.
In seeking dynamism, Diabate is especially interested in markets. He’s especially interested in their creation of waste, evidence, he feels, that they are organic entities. “Trash is not collected, though taxes are.” When you sell a lot, you produce a lot of trash - trash is a good indicator of energy in a system.
Diabate sees city-dwellers as pushing for a vision of their city, a vision that is rarely carried out as governments are rarely capable of inplementing the vision. Change happens instead through the “aggressive taking of space” - “If you don’t occupy the street, you don’t sell. If you son’t sell, you don’t eat.” And if you don’t eat, you can’t expect the health care system to care for you. So you occupy the sidewalk, whether or not this fits within the city plan.
Diabate shows us two African masks to talk about his definition of design. He believes that design involves function, cost and aesthetics, and that design that ignores one or more of these elements fails in some sense. He shows an art-object chair, a beautiful and impractical work influenced by traditional African chair design. “It’s pretty, but unconnected from the people,” as it’s wholly impractical, beautiful but expensive.
In contrast, Diabate shows us examples of indigenous design that meet his criteria more neatly: a lumber cart made from salvaged tires, the display of calabashes in a market, sidewalk shoeshine stands. He talks about “human vending machines”, the young men who appear in traffic jams to sell things you don’t need at exorbitant prices.
How do you make objects that connect with people? By looking at the objects that are around you, from cellphone booths to plastic shoes. What’s produced through lack of means is often more important than what’s created with a surplus of money. He urges us to look for design solutions that are “around the corner” for problems we face.
Africa’s Balancing Act
My friend Russell Southwood is introduced by Emeka as “a singular authority on coverage of African technology and communications.” He’s certainly the authority I rely on, specifically his brilliant Balancing Act newsletter.
Southwood tells us that he was inspired to start writing about African technology by John Perry Barlow’s article “Everything You Know about Africa is Wrong,” which he characterizes as half crazy, half fascinating. Barlow’s vision was that Africa could move from an agricultural economy, skipping the industrial revolution, and straight to the post-industrial.
Southwood sees a set of “door openers”, which could help create this sort of social and techical change. Studying the movement from fixed line phones to mobile phones, he notes a change in “selling shortage and corruption.” To get a land-line phone in Africa a decade ago, you had to fill out phones in triplicate, get signatures from district officials, and then waiting 2-3 years. Or you could pay a bribe of $10 to $30 and get a phone almost immediately. Now anyone can walk into a phone shop and get access for about $3. There’s no bribery, no corruption - instead of selling a scarce item, phone companies are now selling plenty. Southwood argues that there are other areas of life where this logic could apply.
Mobiles have gone from $1300 when they were introduced to less than $10 - this still isn’t cheap enough. Southwood thinks we’re about 2/3rds of the way through the mobile price curve. In the slums of Kibera, research shows that four people are sharing a phone - this is a market opportunity if people can reduce the cost of phones. Average monthly revenue per user for telecom companies in Africa is $10 to $15 - in India, it’s down to $4 to $7. if African phone companies can get costs lower, people in Kibera will buy phones.
Bandwidth, Southwood argues, is the fuel of the new economy. He points to the fact that a single cable - SAT-3 - connects Africa to the Internet and that the pricing on this cable is distored by monopoly ownership. In most countries, the cost began at $25,000 per megabit per second per month and has fallen to $10 - 15,000. An investigation in Mauritius suggests that the price should be closer to $3000. Activism by African geeks, including Eric Osiakwan has led to four competing proposals for cables in East Africa, each of which are using open access models and each of which are pricing at $500 - $1000 per megabit per second per month.
If bandwidth prices drop, there will be a huge market for African broadband. When Kenya put 650,000 exam results online, 250,000 students accessed this information. But there are market forces - the “stone chippers” threatened by the bronzesmiths - who are resisting this change. Many are the family and friends of the big men, the Wabenzu, who’ve ruled Africa the past few decades. When communications diversity increases, their power decreases and new market actors can make money providing communications. The money is in selling low cost goods in high volumes, not selling Rolls Royces.
What’s emerging in Africa doesn’t look a lot like Africa as we know it - ask Nigerians about Abuja, the new capital, and they’ll tell you “This is not Nigeria, this is America.” But this is a new, modern Africa emerging as Africans create their own businesses, their own media, their own markets and technology.
African fractals
Ron Eglash has an odd job title - he’s an ethnomathematician whose has built his career studying fractals in African architecture. He starts by explaining fractals, walking us through George Cantor’s subdivision of lines to infinity by eliminating the middle third of each line. The result, on an infinite line divided into a set of points larger than infinity, literally drove Cantor mad. But other mathematicians built additive fractals like the Koch curve. These shapes were all self-similar - they look similar in large and small scales. And if you try to measure their surfaces, you’ll discover that they’re infinite in length.
These curves were unpopular with the mathematical establishment - they were termed “pathological curves”, and largely ignored for a hundred years, until Benoit Mandlebrot observed that fractals were extremely common in nature.
Egland’s work began by analyzing photos of African villages and seeing fractal patterns. With a Fulbright grant, he began travelling around Africa and asking people why people build the way they do. He found palaces made from fractile organizations of rectangles, villages of self-similar circular compounds, Nigerian villages apparently built from self-similar circles. The only straight lines in this village were associated with the altar used for annual sacrifice. These patterns have religious significance in many cases - a recursive stack of calabashes is topped by a tiny calabash, which contains a woman’s soul and is smashed when she dies.
Egland is clearly used to skepticism about his work. He asks and answers some of the questions he most often faces:
- Aren’t these patterns just indigenous to all architecture?
He’s studied indigenous architecture in native American and South Pacific culture as well, and while native American architecture has circular and four-fold symmetry, it lacks self-similarity.
- Aren’t you ignoring the diversity of African cultures?
There’s self-similarity throughout African architecture, but there are different algorithms in different places.
- Does this represent real math knowledge, or is it just intuitive?
Many of these patterns are algorithmic. Egland walks us through the production of woven grass mats - they’re woven loosely on the bottom, where the wind is less fierce, and more tightly at the top. There’s a clear, logarithmic relationship between efficiency and effort - the African mathemeticians building these mats are doing a very good job.
Egland looks closely at Bamana sand divination, a complex system of making patterns of dashes. The system, he learned, works as a psuedo-random number generator using modula 2 addition. He argues that this system migrated into Spain from the Islamic world, becoming “geomancy”… which influenced Leibinitz, and can be traced to the birth of the digital computer. Responding to Brian Eno’s complaint that there’s not enough Africa in computers, he quipps, “I don’t think there’s enough African history in Brian Eno.”
Google in Africa: big goals, small steps
Google is one of the three major sponsors for TED Africa, alongside AMD and GE. They hosted lunch today for a group of attendees to feature the company’s work in Africa, both through the corporation and Google.org, the foundation formed with 3 million shares of Google stock. Larry Page talked briefly about his interest in Africa and his naive desire to see Google hire 10,000 Africans. He quickly discovered that “multinationals are allergic to Africa” in part because it’s very hard to hire in Africa due to some labor and anti-corruption laws. Google is now trying to hire one person per African nation, and to build networks around those key informants, growing a team one country at a time.
Dr. Larry Brilliant from Google.org mc’d a set of speakers. There weren’t any new announcements in the talk, but it was interesting to see the scope of Google’s focus on the continent, which include:
- A business plan competition in Ghana, which provided entrepreneurship training to 60 businesspeople and funding for four winners. Joseph Tackie, the founder of a butcher shop dedicated to selling locally farmed meat seasoned with local spices to a Ghanaian audience, spoke about the value of the training received and the prospects of his business. Ken Ofori-Atta, one of Ghana’s leading venture capitalists, has committed $2 million in equity funding for companies that are identified through this program in the future, and Google is now replicating the contest in another eight nations.
- On the corporate side, Google has been researching business opportunities on the continent, visiting Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda, looking for possibilities and opportunities. Google has recently hired a Kenyan ISP entrepreneur as their Kenyan representative, helping them research opportunities and put pressure on the various projects designed to bring high bandwidth connections into east Africa. Google has also committed to providing free versions their online office and collaboration tools to government departments and schools in Rwanda and Kenya.
- Andrew McLaughlin (my friend and collaborator) took less than a minute to excoriate the African telecom environment, letting the audience know that, before someone can build a business like Google in Africa, monopoly and former monopoly telecoms need to let go of their “deathgrip” on the telecom industry. He tells the audience that Google is committed to bringing tools like Google maps, book search, Gmail and Blogger into Africa, but that this is going to require a battle with entrenched powers.
It’s interesting to see Google try to position itself in relation to the continent, but it seems like these are baby steps. Perhaps that’s the right size of steps to take while the company figures out what to do in Africa. Some of the steps, though, seem potentially steps backwards - encouraging schools and universities to put their infrastructure in the hands of Google reduces costs, but also might reduce technology training and expertise within these countries. Asking Andrew McLaughlin about this, he concedes it’s a possible problem, but mentions that these tools have APIs, which opens the possibility of developing custom software that interfaces with these tools.
Building computers in Nigeria
Florence Seriki is the CEO of Nigerian computer manufacturer, Omatek. She’s interested in the problem of getting African youth excited about computers, and reminds the audience that you don’t need to be an expert to make strides in the technology industry. She got involved out of need - as a chemical engineer, she was running a set of simulations with old Fortran software. The dismal performance forced her to learn a new mathematical modeling language and become a programmer, simply to complete the task.
Learning this new skill helped turn her into an evangelist for computing in Nigeria. She began running computer trainings for Nigerian businessmen. Noting that executives took classes in golf or squash, she began offering classes in the evenings to executives. Because they trusted her as an insructor, they trusted her as well when she began selling hardware to them. In 1986, her company became a hardware seller as well as a trainer.
As she began selling hardware, she noticed that the components were made by different companies, mostly within China. Around the world, companies were integrating these different pieces into a single system - she asked herself, “Why can’t Africans do this?” Her company began making clones of Compaq machines, importing parts from China and assembling locally.
Her goal was to produce high quality goods, defying the local strategy of pricing at 30% below imported goods to counter a perceived quality problem. This doesn’t work in computing, because you still have to import components. Instead, Omatek attempted to create high value machines from Chinese parts and sold at a price that recovered cost. They hugely benefitted from a government decision to purchase all IT from domestic providers.
Seiki saves her critique for local banks - they need to do a better job of making long term, not short term investments. And they need to encourage SME growth, possibly by investing 10% of their profits into SME loans.
Building something from nothing - mobile phones in DRC
Alieu Conteh is a Gambian entrepeneur who has been deeply involved with the Democratic Republic of Congo, even during some of the nation’s darkest days. Under the Mobutu government, he was a coffee exporter, purchasing beans, roasting them in Kinshasa and flying it to London for export.
When the Congo descended into civil war (sometimes called the First Congo War, from 1996-7), Conteh saw this potentially rich nation in ruins. But when Laurent Kabila took power, Conteh saw the possibility to build a business around telecommunications.
He remembered spending five hours at a post office waiting to make a phonecall, watching people sleep at the post office so they could make phonecalls. When the first war ended, there were only about 15,000 fixed lines in the country, largely assigned to Mobutu’s ministers, bodyguards, and some wealthy businessmen. It’s impossible to overstate the need for communications, since there’s very little transport infrastructure in the nation to tie people together.
Despite having almost no experience in telecommunications, Conteh decided to bid for a wireless license. The government’s terms kept changing, eventually increasing to $10m for a GSM license. Conteh pushed back, explaining that the country was still at war and that no one would pay that price given the risk. He ultimately paid $2 million, and was granted a year to build a nationwide network.
But the main challenges were still ahead - no one was interested in funding the project, including equipment manufacturers. He ultimately chose to work with Nortel, using their Piconode system, but had to show 110% of available capital, as no companies would extend financing. Ultimately, he wrote a check for over a million dollars of his own money.
It became apparent immediately that there was a real market for mobile phones. Even before there was a prepaid billing system or international commections, people were queueing up to buy phones for $350 each. With some of the capital generated from those phone sales, he was able to purchase software and equipment from Massachusetts to support prepaid licenses. (It evidently took weeks to persuade anyone from the selling company to come to Congo to install the equipment given state department warnings.)
A major challenge to expansion throughout the nation was resistance from local rebel commanders, all of whom wanted their own licensing fees before allowing towers to be build. Jean-Pierre Bemba relented first, and eventually all four major rebel leaders allowed the towers without additional fees.
The punch line to Conteh’s story is that his company now has 3 million subscribers, half of the total subscribers in DRC, and was recently valued at $1.6 billion dollars. As Chris Anderson says, thanking Conteh for the talk, “There’s money to be made in Africa.”
Feedelix - speaking in your own language
Ted Kidane came to the United States from Ethiopia twenty four years ago as a student, with $50 in his pocket. He starts his talk with a story about misunderstanding - he was visiting a tax preparer (which he found weird as, in Ethiopia, the government never gives money back to you), and then man said “Get out of here.” Kidane didn’t know he was joking, and ran out of the office. He offers this as a lesson in the importance of understanding language and communication.
Sometime after fleeing at office (at high speeds - he’s from Addis, after all, and a runner), Kidane found himself working for HP. He was amazed that business conversations never included Africa. But his early exposure to technology allowed him to start transferring technology back to Ethiopia. Before the web, he used mailing list and bulletin board technology to connect Ethiopian universities. These systems used Fidonet and inexpensive modems to connect academics and students.
One system these users built was a system to post academic papers. One of these early papers was about Unicode, which Kidane hadn’t previously encountered. Unicode is a standard for expressing alphabets across computer platforms - Kidane helped put together a consortium of linguists and computer scientists who build the standard for Ethiopian unicode.
Ten years later, in the wake of the dot.com boom, Kidane returned to this Unicode work. Working with a friend, they figured out how to map 345 characters to 12 keys on a mobile phone keypad, allowing mobile text entry in Ethiopic. This is the key towards building text messaging in Ethiopic and other non-Western languages.
Developing for mobile phones is a key platform in Africa, because mobile market growth is the fastest in anywhere in the world. With 113 million mobile users in Africa today, the market is estimated to expand to 478 million by 2011. The growth in these markets is the function of the world flattening - it’s a process “driven by people who are non-white, non-American” who need to communicate between the diaspora and home.
The value in these markets is creating value added services, like text messaging and multimedia. The Feedelix service makes it possible for users anywhere in the world to download a client that lets people compose and send instant messages in Ethiopic. This became critically important when the government shut down text messaging for political reasons - because the Feedelix product uses the Web via mobile, it was unblocked. And the client program is a framework that works for any ideographic language - Feedelix now includes clients for Chinese and Hindi, and allows people with phones that aren’t localized for these languages to create text in those scripts.
Kidane believes that there’s strength in struggle, opportunity based on overcoming obstacles. He ends his talk by encouraging everyone to stand with him and recite his redefinition of “poverty”:
P stands for possibilities
O stands for opportunity
V stands for validation of our ideas
E stands for enthusiasm to do things
R stands for resillience
T stands for trust
Y stands for yes
Wells’s Journey
Spencer Wells, the author of “The Journey of Man” has been on his own journey, covering the world from Mongolia to Cambodia to Tanzania (twice) in the past few weeks. He’s checking in on the massive geneology project he’s overseeing, trying to determine the common ancestry of all mankind. In the course of this “spot tour”, he mentions he’s aware of just how different we all are: 6 billion people, 6,000 languages.
How do we explain this diversity? If we had a single ancestor - and we believe we do - how do we explain this vast diversity and our spread throughout the globe?
Darwin had an answer - he postulated that our early progenitors lived on the African continent. But he was talking about distant history, our common ancestry with apes. We know that Africa was disconnected from Asia until 16 million years ago, when we see a break in the ape population. But this is way earlier than the common ancestry of humans.
Linneaus started classifying all the species of the world, and ended up classifying 12,000 species, including homo sapiens. He defined subspecies as well, including H. Sapiens Afer (African), H. Sapiens Americanus (Native American) and H. Sapiens Monstrosus (a category for people he didn’t like, plus elves.) This model was largely unchallenged until quite recently. But now research on our DNA record allows us to a) find a common human ancestor and b) try to figure out how different groups diverged over time.
We’re able to do this by tracking mutations in DNA - when our DNA has transcription errors, these act as markers in human populations. By tracing mitochondrial DNA - which is only transmitted from mother to child, and Y-chromosome DNA - which is only transmitted from father to son - you can start building a geneological tree of our origins.
Building this tree shows us that the longest mutational legacy and the greatest human diversity is in Africa. This means we all share an African ancestry, and at some point, a group of Africans broke away from the continent and resettled elsewhere. We have a single African ancestor, and according to mitochondrial DNA, our common “Eve” was 200,000 years ago. Our common father is even more recent - 60,000 years ago, which suggests we were still all living in Africa at that time.
The reasons for our migration come from the weather. The last ice age came into play 70,000 years ago, burying North America under ice sheets, and drying the global climate. This massively increased desertification in Africa, reducing habitable area to very small patches. Human population crashed to less than 2,000. But our rebound comes from the rise of culture, which accelerated rapidly around 60,000 years ago. Suddenly we see the apperance of art, much finer tools, specialized hunting techiques, and, probably, complex language.
Our ancestors began migrating, following continuous grasslands, which acted as “moving meat lockers”. A huge grassland stretching from Germany to Korea was practically a highway for human migration. And some truly hardcore humans went north to Siberia and crossed to North America via a land bridge.
Wells documented much of this journey in “The Journey of Man”, which inspired a National Geographic film. The Geographic Society was so inspired, they offered to sponsor his work. Wells asked to increase their research population by an order of magnitude - they’ve built ten population genetics centers around the world, collecting DNA from indigenous populations. Individuals can participate by buying DNA kits online - the profits from those kits funds The Legacy Society, which works to preserve culture and language. So far, DNA from 25,000 indigenous people and 250,000 online volunteers has been collected, helping build a much richer map.
Craftskills: Taking Africa offline
Simon Mwacharo of Craftskills is dedicated to bringing power to the poorest corners of Africa. He sees the key problem as the high cost of power transmission, the difficulty of getting power from hydroelectric generation facilities to the people who need it.
Mwacharo is experimenting with low-velocity wind turbines for use in Kibera, Nairobi, and is also trying to get people to reconsider using solar power. Unfortunately, solar was oversold by unscrupulous entrepreneurs, who sold panels that couldn’t possibly power the batteries they were sold with - many of these systems died shortly after sale. Overcoming this skepticism is part of Mwacharo’s work as well.
The spread of technology to rural areas is moving more quickly than electricity. People in very rural areas have mobile phones - they pay 100 Kenyan shillings to travel to nearby towns to recharge their sets. 85% of Kenyans have no grid power, pointing to the need for micropower generation.
The turbines Mwacharo is developing are made primarily of local materials, up to 90% of the systems available domestically. The current 300 watt turbine, equipped with fiberglass blades, is available for $750, or $2.50 a watt, about 40% cheaper than imported turbines and half the cost of solar banels. The devices are made by local engineers trained by technical academies. They’re installing systems that feature 300 watt turbines, a 14 watt solar panel and batteries, which can power large rural homes, or small parts of a community. By leveraging power efficient technology like LED lights, more homes can be affected. And microbusinesses, selling power to charge phones or operate TVs, allow for microentrepreneurship.
The work is now spreading beyond Kenya - we see slides for a 15,000 watt hydropower plant in Cameroon. Answering questions after the talk, Mwacharo admits he’s not yet advertising for the simple reason that he doesn’t yet have capacity to support all the interest in the product.
Two extraordinary women from Tanzania
Bi Kidude , the 93 year-old queen of Taraab music, honors us with her presence on the TED stage. Leading the ensemble astride a meter-long Msondo drum, accompanied by two other drummers and give dancers, she sounds like a woman a third her age. (Ndesanjo tells me that both the drum and the dance are called “Msando”. He also tells me that Bi Kidude trains young women in the arts of dance before they marry - it’s a form of sex education, preparing them for their role as women.)
Chris Anderson introduces Jane Goodall with the phrase, “from one amazing woman to another”. She offers a chimpanzee call before sleep by way of introduction instead of a “Jambo” or a “bon soir”. She references the late lewis Leakey, the famous paleontologist, as the person who set her on the path of studying chimpanzees. Leakey studied the structures of skeletons, but realized that “behavior doesn’t fossilize”. To figure out early human behaviior, perhaps it makes sense to study our closest ancestors, apes and chimpanzees. Now much speculation on early human behavior is based on chimp behavior.
Every chimpanzee has his or her own personality, Goodall tells us. They can live to sixty years old. The female has her first baby at 11 or 12 years old, and additional babies every 5 years. This very long period between children is a function of the dependency of the child on the mother. We believe this is because there’s a great deal of learning chimpanzees need to do to survive. That childhood is a time of cultural learning - the tool-using behaviors seen throughout Africa are passed from one generation to the other in a form of primitive culture.
Chimpanzees have no spoken language, but a rich set of postures and gestures, similar or identical to ours. Chimpanzees kiss, hold hands, pat on the back, swagger and throw rocks at one another. They are capable of extreme brutality and primitive warfare, usually oriented towards neighboring social groups. These discoveries suggest that there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, and that this line blurs more as we make more observations.
Much of Goodall’s research has centered on Gombe National Park, a small forest on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. In trying to preserve chimpanzee habitat, she’s been asking the question, “How do you save these forests when people bordering the forest are struggling to survive?” The presence of huge refugee populations makes this struggle even harder.
She’s helped found a group called “Take Care”, which tries to improve the lives of people living around the park. They build tree nurseries, develop methods of farming suitable to the degraded land and to reclaim overused farmland. This only works by bringing Tanzanians into the villages and asking villagers what they want and need - the villagers focus on health, not preservation. But they discover over time the importance of soil conservation in their overall survival, and the program is now replanting forests and creating “leafy corridors outside the parks” to help chimps migrate.
Goodall is profoundly worried about human impact on the climate. She notes that if the entire world lives using the resources that Americans or Europeans use, we’ll need four planets worth of impact. We used to approach decisions with thinking about seven generations of impact. Now decisions “seem to focus on the next quarterly shareholder meeting.”
She asks, “Is there a disconnect between this extraordinary brain and the human heart?” She sees a great deal of despair in young people talking about the environment. In reaction to this, she’s started a program called “Roots and Shoots”. “Roots represent a strong foundation, and shoots can break through a brick wall to reach the sun.” The groups, ranging in age from pre-school to university, choose their own projects, often planting trees, or organic crops. The programs try to reach child soldiers in Uganda, and try to share information on HIV from youth with the disease to youth who are uninfected.
Goodall is often asked if she has hope - she does, because of the “amazing human brain” and the idea it generates, some of them featured at events like TED. She’s inspired by the talks on composting and on renewable energy. And she’s inspired by leaders like Nelson Mandela and his powers of forgiveness and by Ken Saro-Wiwa and his demand for justice. And she’s inspired by the woman who runs the conference center we’re working in, a proud graduate of the Roots and Shoots program.
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