Ask HN: Which developing nations have interesting tech stories at the moment?

Konga (a Nigerian company) is trying to upset Joomla (a South African company) to become the Amazon of Africa, and co-working spaces are starting to sprout all over the place.

There are over a hundred different mobile payment solutions, not just in the micro-payment sector, but for traditional middle class spending.

There's also been a recent boost for Nigeria to get back into agriculture (~80% - 90% of produce is imported. Welcome to the Resource Curse), there are some entrepreneurs trying to approach this field with the advantages tech can bring to the African agriculture landscape.

He traveled to Vietnam and observed a high quality Computer Science education in primary / secondary school. Talking about grade 11 scholars, he wrote:

After returning to the US, I asked a senior engineer how he'd rank this question on a Google interview. Without knowing the source of the question, he judged that this would be in the top third. The class had 45 minutes to design a solution and implement it in Pascal. Most of them finished, a few just needed another five minutes. There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process.

BBOXX are using the combination of developments in renewable, battery tech, big data and IoT to bring down the cost of offering solar energy to people living in the most rural areas of the world. Briefly, we use the above technology to enable a pay-as-you-go solution to energy whereby a customer can sign up for a small and affordable down-payment. We will then dispatch one of our installers to fit the system in the customers house and teach them about how it works. We will then remotely monitor the system over the GSM network to ensure it is providing a reliable source of energy. The customer then pays weekly or monthly using mobile money to keep the system enabled. The data-side of what we do enable us to prove to investors and financiers that we understand our customers and can control repayment rates which means we can continue to grow the number of systems we have deployed.

We currently have most of our units deployed in Rwanda and Kenya through our fully owned retail network but more recently have launched partnerships in Nigeria, Cameroon and Pakistan.