Business
Six astounding ways Africa is paving the Way for the future of technology
By Jack Smith IV
Every week, the American tech sector uses the most advanced mobile technologies in the world to create some new meaningless distraction. Tinder for dogs; Airbnb for boats; Yo – all sorts of luxury convenience tools created to manufacture and solve problems that do not exist and extract some in-app purchases along the way.
Meanwhile, in Africa, a budding generation of technologists, coders and entrepreneurs are rising to solve their continent’s most pressing problems. Entire new industries around payment solutions, crowdsourcing and entertainment media are springing up in tech hubs in Kenya, Nigeria and other countries.
This is the rise of Silicon Savannah – and a few ways it’s going to change the global face of technology.
1. Africans are more mobile, and mobile is the future
Every few months, the mobile Web – the Internet on your phone, as opposed to your laptop – eats away at another corner of the Internet. Gaming, payments, social media, search, communication and everything else you can think of is giving way to the supercomputers in our pocket. People are meeting the loves of their lives, running businesses, writing their memoirs on their phones.
In Africa, the past 10 years have seen a boom in cellphone ownership and usage. Two-thirds of all homes in sub-Saharan Africa own at least one mobile phone, according to a Gallup poll.
“In a few short years, the proliferation of mobile phone networks has transformed communications in sub-Saharan Africa,” the Pew Research Center reports. “It has also allowed Africans to skip the landline stage of development and jump right to the digital age.” Essentially, Africa leaped over the PC era and landed directly in the mobile revolution.
In fact, most of the rest of the world is way ahead of the United States in terms of mobile. China is the largest cellphone market in the world, with 1.25 billion mobile phone subscribers, many of whom are mobile exclusive. And these countries have a major leg up when it comes to developing mobile solutions.
2. Which is why they’re better at paying with their phones
In the United States, every app is trying to become some kind of mobile PayPal. Facebook messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest – not to mention apps explicitly for payment, like Apple Pay. But nobody is really using them – at least not compared to Kenyans.
