The outcome of the ANCs long-awaited KwaZulu-Natal conference was a win for the Thuma Mina crowd. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
A few months ago, I visited Barsoloi, a small town in Northern Kenya about seven hours away by road from Nairobi. Barsoloi is a picturesque town that is home to just over 15 000 people.
However, despite the fact that there are now more mobile phones than toilets in Africa, this little one-street town was virtually cut off from the world until January this year, when Safaricom put up a telecommunications mast in the area. But the real story lies in what happened after the mast was put up, which is what I think captures the true essence of Africa.
In the absence of a power grid, a number of entrepreneurs set up stations around the tower, offering mobile phone charging to residents for a small fee.
In the absence of a way to communicate security issues, the residents formed SMS groups that kept both them and the police informed on incidents.
Most tellingly, in the absence of a means to communicate with bigger medical centres, the town’s sole dispensary would often run out of essential medicines and health workers would have to walk to each one of their patients’ homes to check on them. This changed.
Out of absence came opportunity.
The story of how Kenya became the leading mobile financial player has been told many times. To date, M-PESA has transferred over ShKsh4.18-trillion ($43-billion), or the equivalent of 40% of Kenya’s gross domestic product (GDP). This phenomenon has baffled investors, and brought many knocking on Safaricom’s door to find out what the elixir of success tastes like.
Out of opportunity must come commitment. Without commitment, the new Africa will not succeed. Over the last 14 years, Safaricom has grown to become not only Kenya’s largest mobile service provider but also the biggest IT services company in the region.
But the true sign of success is not whether we are the biggest or the best — it’s the responsibility to ensure that accomplishment is supported by sustained commitment and is used to transform lives at every level.
Three areas are critical to the continued success of our fast growing technology ecosystem: opportunity, people and partnerships.
Six of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world are in Africa. Consumers have more disposable income, there is a bulging middle class, more than half of our citizens have internet-capable devices, and increasingly sophisticated networks are coming up, such as the 4G platform we recently launched.
Today, McKinsey says that Senegal and Kenya, though not as large as South Africa’s economy, have Africa’s highest iGDPs. iGDP stands for the amount that the internet contributes to a country’s GDP. Kenya’s iGDP is rated at 2.9%, higher than those of Brazil or China.
With about three-quarters of nearly one billion Africans already using mobile phones, the acceleration in “mobile money” services is expected to achieve more than US$160-billion in transaction value by 2016. This translates to increased opportunity to grow our Silicon Savannah. It means our innovators must create locally relevant solutions that meet the needs of our people and transform their lives.
This leads me to the second point I would like to cover: people.
Notably, there has been a commendable increase in the number of incubator and accelerator hubs across Africa that offer advisory services, mentorship, research and development facilities, investor access and exposure-demo platforms.
Innovators need to take advantage of these to learn and grow as well as have visibility of what is going on to avoid duplicating or creating copycat products.
Lastly, partnerships hold the key to the continued success of the African innovation story.
One of the key learnings for Safaricom over the years has been the fact that without collaboration -—which includes working with fellow sector players, government or start-ups — you are merely innovating for yourself.
Increasingly, we are seeing more emphasis on private-public partnerships in this area and I believe this is a positive development as it formalises and deepens our ability to fast- track the growth of our innovation ecosystem.
It is equally crucial for governments and citizens to commit to buy from local start-ups and small to medium enterprises, so that we can create more jobs and boost economic empowerment opportunities.
As Africans, we must commit to continue to empower each other so that we build on that lead by creating truly transformative solutions for the continent.
Bob Collymore is chief executive of Safaricom Limited