App and software developers are springing up in Africa’s tech-savvy markets. Better engineering training and a few breakthrough stories could promote long-term growth

Much has been made in recent years of Africa’s ‘innovation boom’, as Nairobi, Cape Town, Lagos and Accra emerge as stomping grounds for technology start-ups. The surge of activity tracks the continent’s blossoming relationship with the mobile phone, with penetration rates now in excess of 60 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa’s mobile market currently has the fastest growth rate in the world, with the number of connections increasing by 44 percent annually since 2000, according to Deloitte.

A closely related trend has been the proliferation of development centres for mobile technologies, or ‘apps labs’, across Africa, with Blackberry, IBM, Google, Orange and Microsoft all setting up such sites across territories. To date, there are over 50 tech hubs, labs, incubators and accelerators in 20 African countries.

Alexandra Zagury, Blackberry’s managing director for South and southern Africa, attributes this to the great demand from local entrepreneurs who want to make their own software. “We flew out our specialists to Botswana [for a ‘BlackBerry Jam’ seminar], and there were 260 developers out there wanting to develop apps,” she says. “Who would know that there is an avid app developer community in Botswana?” She also notes that the labs are filling a practical skills gap currently left by academic institutions. “That hands-on lab approach is what’s missing,” she says, “and that is why we have had so much interest from universities across Africa.”

This enthusiasm also extends to an increasing number of Africa’s politicians, notes Jonathan Batty, communications manager for IBM Growth Markets. “A lot of African governments are betting on information and communications technology,” he explains. “Rwanda has made tremendous progress in terms of leveraging ICT. We’ve seen this in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa. In general on the African continent, many governments are realising that to reach their citizens, as well as for economic improvements, ICT is one of the major engines.”

This engine is humming in Lagos, where the gaming industry, led by self-taught locals, is thriving, as epitomised by the success of KULUYA, an online gaming company, whose valuation has risen to $2m within just six months of launching.

Kunle Ogungbamila, the head of KULUYA, attributes this success in large part to his company’s use of African protagonists and narratives within its games. “Africa has a lot of stories, which are actually entertaining, but no one is telling the stories about the gods, the metaphysical [world], the slave trade,” he says. To do so, he aims to develop a series of animated 3D games, which are currently in short supply on the continent.

But the entertainment focus of the African tech sector has met with criticism from some quarters, where it has been argued that these new technologies are being developed to only serve the needs of the affluent while neglecting the millions of Africans who still live without basic services and amenities.

Gbenga Sesan, the executive director of Paradigm Initiative Nigeria, a social enterprise that connects Nigerian youth with ICT-enabled opportunities, rejects this analysis. “The 1 percent only keeps an eye on what the 1 percent is doing,” he says, referring to perceptions of the Lagos start-up scene. But he sees a different reality. “A lot of young people who [would be] otherwise unemployed are now taking advantage of technology to solve the problems around them. It’s a win-win for everyone: unemployment is being tackled for individuals, and technology is being leveraged.”

Idris Bello, his compatriot and the founder of the “We”nnovation Hub in Lagos, agrees, pointing to the advances being made to serve communities outside the big cities. “For instance,” he says, “in Nigeria most people access the net via mobile, which means they pay huge amounts for data.

So not only is it slow, it is also very costly, to the extent that people call all those modems that they use ‘plug and pray’. You plug [it in], and then you have to pray for it to work.”

The main challenge, as Mr Bello sees it, is to bring “useful, relevant and accessible” information to people who are constrained by bandwidth and who have an intermittent supply of electricity. He sees one solution - epitomised by education start-up OTG Playa, a member of his hub - in creating “a network of offline clouds, which only go online to refresh data, and which have huge storage. People within a one mile radius of such a device can access this content [for free, and without going online].”

The same emphasis on entrepreneurship is visible across the continent.

“We realise that the government in general will not be the one to create jobs for this whole workforce,” says Leah Charfi, the director of the Microsoft Innovation Centre in Tunisia. “We want each graduate student in IT to create software that is relevant locally but could [also] have a global outreach.” One example, developed through the centre’s Annual StartUp Programme by the Tunisian company Chifco, is the InnerJ Solution. This device monitors all household energy use in real time, thus increasing fuel efficiency and saving on monthly bills.

Mobile services

As Africans conduct an increasing proportion of their business via phones, companies are building their mobile offerings in step.

To add to its mobile banking service, which after just three years has five million customers in 13 countries, Orange has launched the ‘Village Phone’ in Côte d’Ivoire, Niger and Mali, connecting thousands of villages where there is no fixed network. This scheme, notes Arnauld Blondet, Orange’s vice president of marketing, products and innovation for the region, has led to several unexpected results. “It has provided usage for education, for communication, for infotainment…it is quite amazing that when you open internet access in a village, Africa finds many usages that even we didn’t think about.”

One such usage can be found in the field of public health, where IBM has collaborated with Novartis and Vodafone on the Tanzanian pilot of SMS for Life, a programme designed to facilitate the supply of anti-malaria medication. It now serves all 5,000 of the country’s public health facilities.

The next challenge, says Mr Batty, is to realise the potential of such innovation in the mobile sphere “in such a way that it is commercially viable and sustainable...over the next five years”.

Mr Bello echoes this concern: “One of the challenges of innovation on the continent is actually scaling up…making it viable through partnership with government, or making it such that it can easily be bought by the larger market. There are a lot of hoops to jump through.”

Blocking progress

Professor Calestous Juma, the director of the Science, Technology, and Globalisation Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has identified other key inhibitors of the spread of technological innovation in Africa. One of these, which he first commented on in 2005, was the traditional separation of basic and applied research. But eight years on, the picture is significantly better.

“We are starting to see the creation of new telecoms universities that seek to link research with training and commercialisation of products and services,” he says. “Examples of such institutions are the Nile University (Egypt), the Multimedia University (Kenya) and the Ghana Technology University. Other countries are thinking of similar institutions. Progress, however, has been slow because of the complex legal, financial and political aspects of higher education. It will happen, but slowly.”

At a more fundamental level, Mr Juma warns that a general lack of engineering education on the continent is the single biggest barrier to Africa’s potential to translate its current natural resource-driven growth into innovation-led economic transformation.

“Without massive investment in engineering education even the infrastructure that is being built by China will soon start to crumble due to lack of maintenance capacity,” he says. “Cracks are going to start showing in the next few years because Africa’s tropical conditions will start to degrade roads, bridges, railways, airports and other facilities.”

Mr Juma’s blend of caution and optimism is shared by Amr Shady, the CEO of Egyptian mobile service provider T.A. Telecom. He has watched the emerging “innovation battle” that accompanies the growing presence of large Indian companies such as Airtel in the continent’s markets with interest. He notes that, though 50 percent of all new phone sales are smartphones, many Africans still have fairly basic mobile handsets. “We still have to cater to our users who are using four to five year old Nokia handsets, and sometimes even older than this,” he says.

What Africa’s tech industry needs, he says, is for a local business - perhaps an operating company like MTN - to make a breakthrough that is relevant not just for a local, but for a global audience.

Nmachi Jidenma, the founder of CP-Africa, a website that analyses trends in African business, technology and culture, points to iROKOtv as one such global success story. The Lagos-based company, which is the world’s largest legal digital distributor of African movies - including Nollywood films - will, she believes, galvanise others to follow suit.

She also suggests that, while there are still not enough people creating technology specifically to address Africa’s social issues, many of the necessary advances may occur indirectly. “I definitely think that people should put their talents towards solving some of the more challenging problems on the continent, but the truth is that it is difficult to gain traction in those areas,” she says.

“The person who founded Facebook didn’t necessarily say that he wanted to solve a serious social problem per se. He just created a communications platform that ended up being the catalyst for revolutions in multiple countries. So I think that people are hoping that focusing on other areas will have those [same] big macro-level impacts in the long run.”