African Solutions

Article from This Is Africa. "The Digital Generation"

Google’s Nairobi office has none of the famous beanbags “but we have an exercise ball,” says Joe Mucheru, “and a Nintendo Wii.”

Mr Mucheru, head of Google East Africa, is spearheading the company’s drive into Africa’s growing software markets. Google is one of the world’s most recognised brands, synonymous with the bleeding edge of the internet economy. Its market capitalisation stands at more than $100bn and its sprawling headquarters in Palo Alto, California, has been both lauded and derided for its unconventional working practices.

Regardless of – or perhaps due to – its peculiarities, Google has continually proven itself devastatingly effective at both anticipating and shaping future trends in the internet economy. However, it seems strange that it sees the future here, in a small but airy office overlooking Nairobi’s well-heeled commercial district of Westlands.

There are still, Mr Mucheru concedes, those within Google who do not yet understand exactly what his operation does. Dubbed a “deployment office”, it combines a mixture of functions, from development and sales to some that are less well defined. This, he says, is a necessity, given the current state of the marketplace. “Traditionally, Google has either opened a sales office, so a place where the primary objective is dollars, or an engineering office, where the primary objective is engineering. You’ve had that happen all throughout the world,” he says.

East Africa is not yet well connected. In fact, much of the continent lacks penetration of fibreoptic cables, keeping the availability of access low and the cost to the consumer high. For Google, which essentially thrives as a gateway to content and makes its revenues through targeted advertisements placed alongside search results, access is vital. Even so, Google sees in the continent’s huge population of under-25s an enormous opportunity. Like many others, he points to the rapid uptake of mobile phones and associated applications as an indicator of consumer demand for technology.

“If you look at the mobile [industry], and how it has grown, it grew like that,” Mr Mucheru says, snapping his fingers. “The take-up is very fast. Technology comes in waves, and if you’re not prepared – if you’re not ready at the beginning of the wave – then you’ll have a big task to climb to the top, if you want to ride it.

“So that, combined with the mission of the company – which is to organise all of the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful – it makes sense to have an office in sub-Saharan Africa, but you can’t then have an office that looks at revenues. You can’t then have an office that’s looking at engineering talent. Not because there’s no talent, but we don’t have an abundance of either,” he explains. In true Californian style, Google Kenya is waiting for a wave. It is a wave that has been building in developed markets for the past few years, changing the economics of technology and having broadly felt – if sometimes shallow – social effects.

A Different and Better version of Entrepreneurship

A Note From One Better Africa

One Better Africa is a new organisation comprising of a young dynamic team that is passionate about creating change through giving. As an organisation we are itching to get things going, we firmly believe that every passion has its destiny, and that this passion for creating social change and awareness has a great destiny in our country and continent. But we cannot do it alone.

Our society has put great emphasis in the youth succeeding against all odds, especially in the time of economic growth in South Africa specifically. Much emphasis has been put in entrepreneurial strides for the emerging youth of South Africa. Structures have been placed to financially aid small business and growing businesses, but it seems little of these funds have been allocated to empowering those that are to follow.
The few that have gained from these structures, such as the Umsobomvu Youth Fund, are but a fraction of those that have little or no proper education in the country, and Africa as a whole. Much more emphasis needs to be placed on creating awareness of these great gaps between those that have and those that have no opportunity to even be educated adequately. The past regimes of apartheid and other regimes through out Africa focused on marginalising racially. The current ‘regime’ has knowingly or not, marginalised people through social classing. If the most needy can be given opportunities to be educated, fed, housed and provided with adequate health facilities, the playing fields will certainly be levelled. Poverty will almost certainly be a thing of the past, and the economic gains speak for themselves. The more South Africa and Africa at large produce skilled men and women, the greater the chance of economic growth and foreign investment, the results of a ripple effect created by giving all the opportunity to learn and grow, to be healthy and live a humane quality of life. And the best place to begin as at the beginning literally. Giving the millions of orphaned children and underprivileged youths the chance to be educated, the chance to choose their own path, and to not have it determined by poverty and circumstances.

Along with education, health is a massive area of concern in South Africa and Africa. With the number of HIV/AIDS infections struggling to go down year after year. However, there are countries such as Uganda that have managed to reduce the number of infections dramatically. Such cases should be used for research and implementation in countries such as South Africa, were the HIV/AIDS infection rates and deaths are the highest in the world. And the number of children orphaned as a result of their parents dying from the disease increasing daily.

Awareness. Africans are not aware of the state of their own continent. We as Africans are not aware of conditions that our neighbours live in. We do not tell our own stories, instead our stories are told by people and structures from abroad. We have not found a way of sharing information in this age of information. Information is without a doubt one of the most important tools in learning, in gaining knowledge and using knowledge to better the conditions our continent finds itself. A method of sharing such information widely and freely needs to be found and implemented at any cost. The stories of our lives, our struggles, concerns and solutions need to be freely aired without fear or judgement.

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Cheaper Broadband for South Africa

Johannesburg - Businesses and consumers are likely to pay much less for their broadband internet as soon as the $650m, 15 000km-long Seacom undersea cabling system goes live at the end of June.

"The effect is likely to be felt immediately," said Seacom CEO, Brian Herlihy.

Most of South Africa's international bandwidth is trafficked along the SAT3 fibre-optic cable to which Telkom and, since April 2008, Neotel, have exclusive access. This new available bandwidth will remove the duopoly, increase competition, improve the quality of broadband and drive market prices lower.

"The cable will enable a whole lot of people to have access to the internet, especially at grass-roots level, and this will then have an enormous impact on the macro-economy," said director of Digital Bridges, Kate Elphick.

All those previously disenfranchised by poor infrastructure will now be able to connect to the internet and develop themselves as entrepreneurs. Also, access to information will be readily available and government services could be delivered with ease using the internet, said Elphick.

Seacom's 1.2 terabits per second (Tb/s) cable capacity far outweighs Telkom's current 30 gigabits per second (Gb/s) capacity. Even if Telkom were to upgrade its system it would only reach 320 Gb/s, said Arthur Goldstuck, MD of technology research firm World Wide Worx.

With the introduction of Seacom's fibre-optic cabling system, broadband would no longer be a scarce resource but rather a valuable commodity.

Dial-up 'to die away'

Even if broadband prices don't drop immediately, it is likely that data caps will increase, giving consumers more for their money while dial-up systems slowly die away, said Goldstruck.

The laying of fibre-optic cables has already begun in the Red Sea with another group of ships en route to South Africa to begin laying cables in two weeks.

By the middle of February a third set of ships will begin laying cables in India, while a fourth starts laying cables in the Mediterranean Sea in March, said Herlihy.

The cables will run from these three points towards Yemen, with the final joining of the cables, known as splicing, taking place in Yemen around mid-May.

"Seacom is real, the time schedule is real and we have a strong head start on new projects," said Herlihy.

Various cable stations in Asia, Europe and the East Africa have been completed. Station construction in Kenya will be completed by the end of January, Tanzanian stations will be finished by the end of February and South African stations are set to be ready by March 15.

The hiring of operational staff brought the cable system one step closer to completion. International experts advised Seacom to hire a large third national party workforce to run the system, but Seacom had other plans.

"We had resisted this advice and were determined to hire local employees," said Herlihy, "I am very pleased, overwhelmed, with the applications we received and we have hired almost all of our employees out of local markets."