What is true tech disruption?

“Disruption” has become a popular word in the technology space and these days we apply it to just about anything. Any new app or technology we label “disruptive”. But this has led us to ignore the real disruptors in the same way we ignore the billboards on the road each day — if you overuse a word it eventually loses its meaning. Not all new technologies are disruptive, and some clearly have more potential than others.

Companies like Uber or Facebook are true disruptors. These giants have caused chaos and stimulated creativity in whole industries, markets, and possibly even the future economies of nations. Facebook’s new internet solution for Africa has the possibility of upending the telecommunications industries across the continent, which can have an obvious knock-on effect on our economies. Uber has the potential of disrupting our car manufacturing industry, as potentially less people buy cars, especially as Uber finds ways to make its service more affordable. That would undoubtedly affect the way our economies work.

This is what true disruption looks like, but it’s not necessarily how we should define African disruption. I find that we often seem to apply the word disruption to Western innovation, Japanese robotics and the like. But when it comes to African innovation we see ourselves as “copyists’ rather than “disruptors”. There’s always an “African version” of this or that. That’s how we talk, but in the larger scheme of things it’s simply not true.

Since 2006 I’ve had the immense privilege of traveling all over Africa, and what continues to inspire me is how much we’re innovating in our own way. We’re disrupting traditional views of innovation, leapfrogging traditional infrastructure, and forming new stories for the continent. While the Bloomberg Innovation Index doesn’t place Africa far up when it comes to innovation, the problem with these types of modes of measurement is they define innovation purely in Western contexts, and then see how everyone else compares to that.

For example, Livestock Wealth, founded by South African Ntuthuko Shezi, has created a new approach to investment and wealth creation that truly speaks to Africans. Using its platform you can invest in cattle at its farms. You are able to create wealth for yourself as an African while working in the city, without needing to worry about the details of owning your own farm. That kind of innovation doesn’t register on the likes of the Bloomberg’s index, but it’s really smart and disruptive in our own context.

Ushahidi is another disruptor that has disrupted not only here, but across the world. In 2008, in the context of post-election violence in Kenya, it designed a crowdsourced mapping platform that collated eyewitness reports of violence, either sent in via email or text message, and then placed these on Google Maps so everyone could know what was going on. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that the system was better than the media at reporting violence and keeping people informed. Since then the platform has been adopted in dozens of other contexts across the world. It’s used to help track pharmacy stockouts in Southeast Africa; helped to monitor elections in several countries; has been used by Italy to manage forest fires; Australia and the US to map floods; and the Asia-Pacific region uses it for disaster management training events. It’s even been used by civil rights campaigners in the US for tracking police violence.

So we see that technology innovation is indeed coming from Africa and being used across the world. Secondly, we don’t always have to rely on traditional infrastructure. A lack of traditional forms of infrastructure, actually, is partially what drives African innovation. As I catalogued some of the key innovation movements I’ve discovered in recent years in my 2016 book, Disrupting Africa: The Rise and Rise of African Innovation, I began to see something truly exciting emerge. I realised that if you put many of our innovations together a new ecosystem begins to form. That is, as far as I’m concerned, true disruption.

The following five African innovations showcase my point. Despite cataract surgery being a very simple 20-minute routine, rural people don’t have easy access to it. In my book I found a story about Grandma Nojongile, who was blind and received surgery using the Vula app, developed by Dr William Mapham in South Africa. The Vula app is a fantastic tool that helps health workers in rural areas detect cataracts and communicate directly with several specialists. Because cataracts are actually easier to spot with a camera than the naked eye, the specialist is able to diagnose the problem through the photos the rural health workers send to them via the app. Once the problem is diagnosed, the specialist books people in for appropriate surgery at the closest city.

This means that a gogo doesn’t have to travel several times to and from the closest city to be diagnosed and then go for surgery; she only has to make one trip. On her way there she calls family, friends and health practitioners, and using MicroEnsure’s insurance cover; the more calls she makes, the more points she racks up in airtime and subsequently the more free health cover she gets.

After she has had her surgery the doctor will prescribe medicine, which she can collect as she goes home. Counterfeit medicine, however, is a legitimate problem in many African settings, but it is being combatted wonderfully well by Sproxil, created by Ghanaian Ashifi Gogo. Sproxil allows you to simply SMS a unique code (for free) hidden on the packaging of the medicine. You then receive an SMS back, which confirms whether or not your medicine is genuine.

When gogo gets home she makes use of her pay-as-you-go M-Kopa Solar service. M-Kopa, originally from Kenya but growing across Africa, lets consumers pay for a solar panel using the mobile digital payment service M-Pesa. It costs only a few cents a day. M-Pesa is well known these days, allowing you to buy things or exchange money with friends or family without needing a bank account. Overall, using M-Kopa this way, gogo pays less for heating and lighting than if she used kerosene lamps, which are also health hazards. Plus, she is able to pay off the solar panel, eventually enjoying free electricity.

Now all this is true disruption, is it not? This is what technology is supposed to do, is it not? But for some reason we only seem to see technological disruption along the lines of whatever Silicon Valley is doing. Why is that?

The “developed country” status is often attributed to having more advanced industry and technological infrastructure than other countries. But all of this really makes the contexts on other continents the standard and seems to disparage, in a very real way, the kind of innovation we’re seeing springing up at home. It’s a kind of bias or blind spot.

What I’ve outlined above is real-world stuff for real-world Africans. While Silicon Valley apps are amazing and have truly caused disruption all over the world, they’re not the only kind of disruption there is. In fact, I would argue, they are just a small part of it. Innovation from Africa is disrupting so much more — it’s just that we don’t see it in the headlines.

Which brings me to my final point. We need to be talking about this. We have to ask hard questions as to why we’re not. Because when Silicon Valley comes to Africa and seeks to cannibalise our industries, are we ready for that? I believe if we spoke more about our home-grown solutions and invested our money and our time and our headline space in those, we could put ourselves into a position where Silicon Valley works for us, rather than us working for them. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is hugely important in our current climate.