THRIVING AFRICAN WEB
The proliferation of innovation centres to support start-ups on the continent is driven by rising mobile and internet penetration, and Kenya is leading the way
Adecade’s growth that radiated from Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” has culminated in the establishment of hundreds of innovation hubs across the continent. Nascent technologies are helping to produce unique apps and solutions.
Tech watchers usually point to 2007 as the year when Africa’s fourth industrial revolution started. That was when Kenya’s Safaricom launched its M-pesa mobile cashtransfer service in a market that was short on conventional banking services but flush with basic cellphones. It was followed in the same year by the Ushahidi app, designed to track violence in Kenya’s contested presidential election.
Within three years M-pesa was moving millions of dollars internationally, Ushahidi had become a multinational tech company and ihub had been founded in Nairobi as a tech incubator by Ushahidi’s co-founder, Kenyan-raised American Erik Hersman.
All this was enabled by a new undersea fibreoptic cable that dramatically increased East African bandwidth.
The proliferation of innovation centres on the ihub model was driven by mobile and internet penetration: between 2000 and
2017 internet growth on the continent rose from 4.5m to 4.5bn users. The latter figure represented 35.2% of the total population. Close on half the people in countries such as Algeria, Cape Verde, Egypt, Nigeria and SA are online, with Kenya far ahead at 85%.
Internet usage is linked to smartphone penetration as users go mobile, overwhelmingly via 3G, according to the “Mobile Economy 2018” report by the GSM Association (GSMA). The organisation represents the interests of mobile network operators worldwide.
The digital divide is greatest in sub-saharan Africa, the report says. By last year, mobile internet penetration in the region had reached 21%. It is projected to hit 40%, or 280m users, by 2025. This is the world’s largest increase.
By 2016, Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah — the term refers to Kenya’s tech ecosystem — was solidly established. IBM had poured $100m into forming an African research centre with its own supercomputer.
Today, Us-based Fab Foundation, in collaboration with Zambia’s Bongohive, maintains a register of 226 innovation hubs, tech collaboration zones, “makerspaces”, and “hackerspaces” across Africa — up from 170 in 2015, when the register was set up.
GSMA has its own list of 314 hubs operating in 93 cities across 42 countries — though half are concentrated in SA, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria. Some of these are mere online collaborations, others are fully serviced suburbs. Together they have 1.5m Facebook followers.
And Silicon Valley venture capital is flowing swiftly to these initiatives: Aubrey Hruby and Jake Bright, authors of The Next Africa, say they “project at least $1bn in venture capital investment in Africa’s tech start-ups for the period 2012-2018”.
The GSMA report says: “Mobile operators such as Vodacom, MTN and Orange have formed a number of successful collaborations with start-ups in Africa.” It gives the example of Orange Digital, which launched a €50m investment fund for African start-ups last June.
Other recently launched tech hubs