It’s time to move the needle for African innovation
IT’S BEEN AN eventful few weeks. Zimbabwe’s incredible “non-coup” – which led to an unprecedented change in the country’s presidency – easily eclipsed residual public conversations regarding the unprecedented impact the use of digital technologies had on Kenya’s controversial presidential elections.
I recently caught up with PesaCheck. org managing editor Eric Mugendi, who was in Johannesburg to attend the Global Investigative Journalist Conference. He agreed to taping a post-election catch-up conversation with me after I promised not to ask him to provide an exhaustive blowby-blow account of how President Uhuru Kenyatta eventually succeeded in retaining Kenya’s top job.
Mugendi did, however, tell me how he felt following several months of intense coverage of Kenya’s political scene. “We’re all tired,” he said. “We’ve spent so much energy on this as a country. We could have done so much more, but this is what we chose. And honestly, it’s disappointing.”
He also told me that he’s encouraged by how well Kenya’s emerging tech ecosystem has weathered the political uncertainty. He’s particularly excited to see a renewed interest in the development of innovative solutions which address real problems experienced when civic life and technological advancement intersect.
He is hopeful that by the time the next presidential election comes round, Kenya will be better equipped with market-relevant civic technology tools and platforms that will not only prevent the proliferation of fake news and improve levels of public political engagement, but also arrest some of the more harmful, tech-related incidences that characterised the 2017 polls.
Meanwhile, a gathering of 32 tech hub founders and runners from eight African countries was recently hosted at the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.
The event – convened by Journalism and Media Lab (Jamlab) director Indra de Lanerolle – offered delegates the opportunity to participate in moderated discussions on the evolving role of tech hubs in promoting entrepreneurial success within Africa’s innovation scene.
As the event’s facilitator, I was tasked with ensuring that the gathering didn’t end up being “just another talk-shop” and seeing to it that insights were distilled.
Controversial One of the more controversial topics that surfaced during the gathering’s open agenda-setting session was Unpacking the nuances of Africa’s tech and innovation ecosystem.
It was the only scheduled topic which warranted a non-optional plenary owing to the fact that all the delegates had very strong, emotive responses to underpinning questions such as:
What is Africa’s tech and innovation ecosystem? Who is a legitimate player within that ecosystem? Which actors are dominant and most crucial to its success? and Who wields the most power within the ecosystem and/or has the right to assume an agenda-setting mandate?
Upon reflection, I have come to realise why the group had such tough, varied takes on those questions, and why it was very important for us to spend time hacking away at them. It’s because the conversation occurred at the convergence of values, politics and technology.
I reckon that any African who considers themselves an active participant in the continent’s nascent tech and innovation arena (however they choose to define it) bears the burden of constantly having to articulate the unique needs and contextual subtleties of the places where they were born and the people they aspire to serve.
They might also grapple with a justice complex that’s reliably fed by both groundlevel and lofty structural realities which are in stark contrast to the virtuous ideals they espouse and tirelessly project.
I must confess that I’m well positioned to diagnose this dynamic, because I am all too familiar with this internal struggle.
By way of a pragmatic work-around, I’m learning to consciously hang up my justice complex from time to time and temporarily suspend my need to define the legitimacy of ecosystem actors on the basis of their commitment to values such as integrity, fairness, accountability and even humanity.
In doing so, I might then be able to objectively judge their worth on the basis of the value they create and exchange with other stakeholders within the ecosystem.
My value-driven mindset was recently put to the test when I allowed myself to get sucked into a Twitter debate sparked by a gentleman on the platform who suggested that the Kenyan tech ecosystem was overhyped and that Nigeria should get more credit for being “Africa’s Tech Powerhouse” because of “real” tech deals such as Google making good on its commitment to start its Launchpad Accelerator programme in Lagos.
Google has promised to provide in excess of $3 million (R41.7m) in equityfree funding, mentorship, working space and access to expert advisers to at least 60 African start-ups over three years.
Also cited as evidence of the virility of Nigeria’s tech scene was Facebook’s recent announcement of plans to collaborate with Co-Creation Hub Nigeria to open a community hub space in the country next year.
Here’s a summary of my responses to the initial assertion made and the contributions that were subsequently tweeted in support of it.
For starters, given the profound differences in population, geographic location, demographic make-up and proximity to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya and Nigeria offer investors fairly different advantages.
Opportunities As such, in the dozens of conversations I’ve had with numerous foreign investment interests keen on breaking into the continent, I’ve rarely encountered instances where the two countries have had to go head to head for the exact same opportunities.
Then, I can’t ignore the fact that Google and Facebook’s recent Nigeria plays – while delivering significant “value” as defined by their own flowery rhetoric – definitely fall within the realm of PR and self-interest projects when one takes into account the relatively modest size of the commitments made and when compared to the notable “all-in” ecosystem empowerment efforts routinely backed by the likes of Nigerian tech entrepreneurs like Jason Njoku and Mark Essien.
While I submit that the “value” debate is itself an unwieldy discussion that can quickly be scuppered by subjectivity, I do think that it‘s possible to simultaneously appreciate the “value” of plays made by large foreign ecosystem players like Google and Facebook – or anyone else for that matter – while acknowledging their limitations in actually moving the needle for African innovation in specific value-terms and highlighting their inherent weaknesses as actors.
The bottom line is that I don’t have to be a Google or Facebook super-fan (which I definitely am not), or even confident of their capitalist motives and aspirations in order to prove allegiance to the cause of ecosystem upliftment.
Neither is it constructive to discard any positive, value-adding contribution made by ecosystem actors whom I perceive as falling short in terms of my lofty ideals.
That said, Facebook and Google‘s foreign aid deployment choices don’t necessarily point to the creation and exchange of profound business value, or even “impact” , and it would be very unwise to view such tech investments in isolation.
I’ll be judging ecosystem players, not least Google and Facebook, not by their rhetoric, but by the value they add to the continent’s emerging tech ecosystem and society at large. I’ll also continue to sharpen my personal definition of “value”. I encourage you all to do likewise.