Rethinking Africa

Africa as a continent has a notorious history for poor leadership, victimization and poverty. However, that picture is changing rapidly, through technological innovation and record economic gains over the past few years. Africa is now home to the fastest growing mobile market in the world with growth over the past 5 years averaging 65% year on year. It’s lack of computer penetration and use makes it the perfect use-case for what an entirely handset based internet will look like.

Eight months ago I moved from the United States to Uganda where I’ve been studying these trends and working to help Africa take advantage of it’s own assets with my start-up Appfrica.org. Appfrica is an incubator for East African entrepreneurs and software developers. It helps them find opportunities and gain new skills that will make them more attractive to the world market, while also helping to prevent the ‘brain drain’ often experienced when well trained locals go abroad for better jobs. I work with the next generation of Africans on a daily basis, and although I may be biased, it’s time to embrace the intellectual and human assets of the continent as peers in the world economy, instead of as the benefactors of aid money and charity.

You can read about all the advances of tech in Africa on my blog appfrica.net but I’m more than happy to be contributing to the new Africa 2.0 column on this blog. The importance of Africa to the world is huge, but I personally believe that those of us with more recent ancestral ties to the continent have an opportunity to change the narrative. Amidst the current world economic turmoil it’s an attractive place to invest, considering most other markets in the world have been tapped. This is one region that remains to see much private sector investment at all. Sure, countries here are very-much ‘emerging’ and are considered ‘risk markets’ but to me that means there’s infinite potential for growth.

Thanks for reading BlackWeb2.0 and enjoy exploring the new Africa with us.