Africa: off the tech map?

But that does not mean they are not on the map at all - if you saw any of the recent "Africa" season on BBC 4 in the uk it was clear that mobile phone usage is high, there are big cities (like Lagos) with loads going on, film industry, music industry.

It all seems a bit chaotic to my western eyes but its clearly vibrant and resourceful and there is a huge amount of drive. In the Lagos programs a lot of the people featured had the endless inventiveness and ability to rise to challenges we would all think was fantastic in an entrepreneur.

I suspect that Africa will emerge with its own technology ecosystem - not dissimilar to ours but with an African slant. I also suspect it has probably had enough of the west coming and telling it how and what to do.

While it is odd that so many large tech companies haven't highlighted their presence in Africa, there are some notable omissions from that list. Microsoft, for example, have clearly listed contact points and targeted support pages all over Africa, including Kenya[1], and SAP has a number of operations across Africa[2].

The reason for Google not listing their Kenya office seems to be to do with the type of office it is[3]. They do have quite a few jobs listed in both Kenya, and the author's own city: Kampala in Uganda[4].

Perhaps when the tech industry matures, we'll see the kind of coverage a large manufacturing company has[5].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/phone/contact.aspx?countr... [2] http://www.sap.com/contactsap/countries/index.epx [3] http://whiteafrican.com/2008/07/04/google-kenya-and-the-goog... [4] http://www.google.com/jobs/africa/ [5] http://toyota-africa.com/cars/new_cars/index.asp

If you have an office in Lagos, your reach is limited to Nigeria, Ghana and a few other West African countries. The link between Nigeria and Cameroun is weak, and Nigeria to Congo is a difficult journey. To make a trip from Cameroun to Angola, it is probably cheaper to first fly to Portugal and then back.

Africa is a huge place and there are regional circles. So if you bother to make an office in a particular country, you are not covering the whole of Africa (which, combined, probably comprise a good chunk of customers), you are covering just the regional zone that has relationships with that country, and these are probably a much smaller group of people, making it not worth it to have such an office.

He tells of one guy who makes a living sending e-mail for his village. During the week, said e-mail is entered into his laptop. He then walks to a bigger town, uploads and delivers the new mail, downloads e-mail to folks in his down, and walks back to his town. He then delivers what he downloaded.