Rethinking Africa

Erik Hersman -- a cofounder of Ushahidi; founder of the group blog, Afrigadget; the author of the blog, White African, and the founder of iHub, Nairobi's innovation hub -- offered this week's PopTech conferees contemplating the world's geopolitical power shifts a new definition of the term, white space. "In business, it is defined as a place where rules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets are nonexistent and strategy is unclear," said Hersman, who was raised by missionary parents in Africa and spent his childhood traveling between Sudan and Kenya. [Hersman still lives in Africa, with his wife and three children in Nairobi.] "...Business white space is the space between the organization chart, where the real innovation happens" -- and this space right now is Africa, he says.

Hersman told conferees that 313 million people are now moving into Africa's middle class ranks -- a figure that comprises 34 percent of the continent's population. Additionally, 98 percent of Internet subscriptions in Africa are for mobile service, and five of the world's Top 10-fastest growing economies are in Africa. "Ghana has beat Qatar for pole position," Hersman said. And mobile Web innovation is at a peak. He cited three recent Web startups as examples of what he called "reverse development" -- the creation of new tech ideas that Africa is exporting to the West rather than importing from it: Ushahidi, the crisis-mapping service; M-Pesa, the mobile, peer-to-peer money transfer service that has so far conducted more than $8 billion of transactions within Kenya, and MXit, a free instant-messaging application in South Africa that has become an alternative to Facebook in that country and has some 24 million users around the globe -- some 13 million in South Africa, alone. "The mobile revolution that you hear about in Africa? It's real," Hersman said.

And Africa is also transforming itself culturally and spiritually, says Unity Dow (photo above). Young people are "beginning to question why they should mold themselves" into Western notions of what should be "normal" at home and abroad. Dow, a high court judge and human rights activist in Botswana, told conferees "there is a new generation that is not yoked to the past of colonialism" and it is "rethinking Africa. ...And they're asking, 'How can I move forward without having to be Western?'"

"...When people begin to have three meals a day and a warm bed at night, they begin to think," Dow said. "What is happening in Africa right now is that [young people] now have full bellies, cars to drive, and access to the Internet. They're beginning to look around and ask, 'What did we lose as a country in our attempt to be part of 'the Other'? What did we lose when it was un-Christian to be African and to dance the way we danced' and talk and wear our hair differently?"

Dow said this "new awakening" also is creating new diplomatic and economic friends for Africa -- chiefly China. "Africa has a right to extend its friendship across the world without people thinking it is being exploited," Dow said. Africans want to break the image of dependency on the West and rebalance its global relationships. "...When a Westerner sees a shoeless African, he thinks, 'How can I donate shoes?'" Dow said. "But when a Chinese sees a shoeless African, he thinks, 'How can I sell her cheaper shoes?'" China is catering to the continent's fast-growing middle class, she said, by offering inexpensive goods to Africa's new consumers. "It is more expensive to deal with Europe and America that it is to deal with China," she said. "...You can get a flight from Botswana to go to China, and when you land there, there will be a translator and a car waiting for you," Dow said, referring to buying trip services being offered by some Chinese companies seeking inroads into the Africa market. "For many Africans, this is their first trip outside of their country. ...You cannot afford these things in British pounds or dollars but you can if you go to China," she said.

"In the past," Dow said, "all of this would have been unimaginable. But in the last five years, we're seeing a reclaiming of what we lost when we tried to go global." The result? A new and different future for the continent. Said Dow: "The future of Africa is brown, the future of Africa is gendered, and the future of Africa is fair."

PopTech's conference, "The World Rebalancing," ended today.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photograph of Unity Dow by Kris Krug in Camden, Maine, at this week's PopTech conference]

Social Commerce

Silicon Valley's uber-VC, John Doerr, said today that "we are on the verge of a massive reinvention of the Web" -- one that will call forth social entrepreneurs in rising numbers to create "social commerce" around new devices like the iPad , which combine social media and on-the-fly mobile communication.

Doerr, interviewed by PBS host Charlie Rose at the start of today's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Manhattan, said the first great wave of social innovation came with the rise of computer power in the 1980s; the second great wave came in 1995, with the rise of the Internet as an information-sharing device. The third great wave is now, he said. "We've entered a whole new applications economy, where all sorts of new applications of Web technology are being driven by new relationships" being fostered by social media. "This is turning the world around in a really excitiing way," Doerr said. For example, the iPad "is not just a new fad but a new paradigm" for the way people create relationships and for new types of business products, cultures and strategies for social good.

"The iPad is not a computer; you do not need a mouse to operate it," said Doerr, a partner in the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "These are commercially new kindsof magical surfaces that are social. You can take the iPad to concerts, to church." He said the iPad and other such portable social interfaces also "lead to a new kind of social fluidity, a full immersive experience" for people "and a rich terrain for hundreds of new start-ups and social ventures that both make money and serve society." This new type of commercialism, Doerr said, will make one's friends "the most important driving factor in making purchasing decisions."

Doerr also predicted that the convergence of social technology and commerce will change the workplace, speeding the rise of new "missionary" business cultures, rich with new levels of collaboration and social consciousness. "Mercenaries are motivated by financial statements, and sometimes a sense of entitlement," Doerr said, "but missionary cultures are driven by value statements about contribution -- not simply the bottom line." Doerr added: "mercenaries lust for making money but missionaries lust for making meaning." He cited Apple founder Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, among others, as being among these new missionaries. "These guys have turned down opportunities to sell their companies because they're passionate about their products and their impact on society, where the product is the most important contribution."

Doerr said Zynga, the online children's games company, is the "fastest-growing social venture we've ever invested in." He estimated that about 2 percent of the 60 million daily users across the games the company produces want to "buy a better tractor for a farmer or give to a friend or raise money to send bicycle seats to Haiti" or "otherwise do important social things with this technology." This, says Doerrr, is part of the vision and promise of this fledgling new era of social commerce "and it calls forth social entrepreneurs in numbers previously not anticipated."

TechCrunch Disrupt continues through Wednesday. Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: TechCrunch Disrupt on Flickr)