Watching and Calculating, African Governments Learn From the Arab Spring

It's no secret that Africa houses some of the longest-serving and most repressive dictators on the planet. Even among the states that have progressed past authoritarian rule, many governments still restrict basic rights with heavy-handed and often violent tactics. It's also no secret that Africa has the smallest Internet penetration of any continent, though it also cannot be denied that the advent of cheap, web-enabled phones has been precipitating broad changes in the continent's Internet landscape. Up until recently, these two facts may have seemed only peripherally related. Most governments had taken a pretty laissez-faire approach to the Internet; it wasn't enough of an issue for most leaders to take the time to learn about, let alone address with policy. But as the Arab Spring continues to roar just a stone's throw North, tremors have rippled well into the heart of the continent. In response, many African governments have begun taking strong stances on Internet freedoms, even before most of their populations have had the chance to experience the free and open Internet as it was originally formulated.

Read more on the Huffington Post »

Umbono: Jump Starting the Internet Ecosystem in Africa

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa! To preemptively answer your question, no, I'm not on vacation – I'm here to help set up a new program called Umbono, Google's new start-up incubator that will be located here. But before I delve too deeply, let me briefly explain what a start-up incubator is. While the concept of incubators is relatively common in the US, when I've told folks in South Africa what I'm doing here, I often get a look of confusion – "An incubator? Isn't that something you put eggs in?" Well, yes, you could say that...

Mobile Money: African Panacea?

Alternatively titled "My Obligatory M-Pesa Post". Mobile banking/payments is the topic I get asked about most often by people who have just begun to scratch the surface of tech in Africa. "Oh, you work for Google in Africa... I just read about this fascinating mobile banking system in Kenya! Perhaps you've heard of it?" And while I do grow a little tired of fielding the same question again and again, it is the first question I get asked for good reason! The mobile banking phenomenon is an innovation indigenous to Africa, and a perfect illustration of African ingenuity.

Diagnosing malaria? There's an app for that.

If you're familiar with Africa at all, you already know that malaria is a tragic and monumental problem here. Every year, almost 800,000 people due from malaria worldwide, with just about 90% of those deaths coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria is a curable, preventable disease, but the lack of trained medical professionals, diagnostic tools, and prescription drugs in Africa make it a seemingly insurmountable issue. To try to take the malaria problem, a team of computer scientists from across the US built an app that allows for simple malaria diagnosis with a (slightly tricked out) smart phone.

What Technology Brings to the Developing World

When I decided to move to Africa, I did so with the goal to do good. I had spent four years in college studying algorithms, building software and even having fun, but when all was said and done, I craved to do something meaningful. I came to Africa because I wanted to see a different side of life, to broaden my way of thinking, and to make a positive impact where I could. Now just how I would manage to do that was less immediately clear. How could I use my skills to make difference?

Read more on the Huffington Post »

Voice: The Obvious and Yet Unutilized Tool for the Web in the Developing World

Practitioners of technology in the developing world have long accepted that the "normal" ways of interacting with the Internet, the ways that we Westerners have become accustomed to, don't always apply in the developing world. Mobile is a central and critical aspect to any well thought out technological offering for the developing context. At Google, we focus on it relentlessly. The numbers are clear: mobile penetration outstrips traditional Internet penetration by at least an order of magnitude in Africa. This picture becomes even more revealing when we look at the types of phones that people have. The majority of African mobile users don't own smart phones or even feature phones; the majority rely on phones with only basic calling and messaging services like SMS and MMS. So if we're going to reach the vast majority of Africans, we need to focus there. To this effect, a lot of work has been done around SMS. Google has launched its Health and Agriculture Tips, for instance, but SMS has a number of serious contextual limitations: illiteracy, lack of functional literacy, and local languages not supported by phone keyboards. But there's also another route that hasn't been so explored: What about voice? What about voice as a tool for interacting with the Internet?

Political Turmoil and the Internet in Africa

On December 17, a young Tunisian college grad, frustrated by his inability to find a job and the harassment he received from the police, publicly set himself on fire and, in effect, set off an explosive chain of events that would change the political landscape of his country forever. In just the last few months, there has been an unprecedented surge in the continent's political instability. The dictator of Tunisia has been ousted; the former president of Cote d'Ivoire hanging onto his post despite calls from a united international community to step down, and the most recent anti-government riots in Egypt calling for the resignation of the country's leader. Technology has played an pivotal role in each of these situations, whether by its innovative use, as a tool for governmental oppression, or by its notable absence. 

Atop the Great Firewall of China

When I was in Shanghai last month, one of the first things to hit me was just how prevalent Internet censorship is in China. Dubbed the Great Firewall, China's Internet restriction policies are widespread and, arguably, the most extensive in the world. In fact, one of the main reasons there were no new blog posts from that period was because Blogger is blocked. For that matter, so is Facebook, Twitter, and a whole host of other commonly used online tools. Speaking of Facebook, someone from my old team there created a stunning data visualization of Facebook friendships around the world that illustrate the Great Firewall quite well.

As many commentators have pointed out, there's an awfully glaring hole in this world map: China's nowhere to be seen. In addition to general censorship of the Internet, China also employs a small army of "Internet police", rumored to number over 50,000, who "guide discussion" in online forums, or to put it more bluntly, disseminate propaganda. The government also monitors the Internet activity of individual citizens, specifically ones suspected of dissidence. To this point, Amnesty International points out that China has actually imprisoned more journalists and cyber-dissidents than any other country in the world. As an American, I have to admit it was quite jarring to all of a sudden not have the same liberties that I've grown up with. I wonder how the actual inhabitants of the country come to deal with the restrictions or if they even have an impact on people's day to day lives. Perhaps I'll just have to go back to find out for myself...

Sign up for email updates.

Launching Google Trader in Ghana

In between getting 200 Nigerian businesses online and flying off to Singapore for my month in Asia, I had spent one day in Ghana to help launch the country's largest classifieds website, dubbed Google Trader. We had launched Trader as a pilot in Uganda over a year ago, and after months of iteration and improvement, we're seeing it spread to the other side of the African continent. Since I had been involved in much of the pre-launch preparations, I decided to come back to Ghana in between my two other stops for the big day. And boy was it a big day.

One Day, 200 Nigerian Businesses Online

There I stood, in front of my first group of 100 small business owners at ChamsCity, the world's largest cybercafe, in Lagos, Nigeria. I had just been informed that none of the equipment I thought I would have was functional. No projector and only a broken microphone. And then, to top it off, due to a last minute schedule change, I was going to be giving the entire workshop rather than just the second half. Lovely. If I were going to pull this off, I would need to be quick on my feet.

Our Strategy in Africa Part IV: Looking Toward the Future

No matter how much resources Google, or any other company, pours into Africa, our bets will never pay off unless we keep an eye out for the long term. How can we help develop not only an Internet ecosystem in Africa, but also one that's sustainable? In this final installment of my series on Google's strategy in Africa, I'd like to put the spotlight on one specific initiative that's been underway for many months aimed at achieving this very goal: Google's G-Africa events, run by none other than my friend and colleague, Bridgette.

Our Strategy in Africa Part III: Making the Internet Relevant and Useful

Did you know that Africans represent 14% of the world's population and yet only 2% of the Internet users? With numbers like that, it shouldn't be surprising that there isn't much African content online or very many products aimed solving African problems. Thus, we hit a bit of a chicken-and-the- egg problem. Because there are so few Africans online, there is very little useful or relevant content, and because there is so little useful or relevant content, there's very little reason for Africans to get online in the first place. We're hoping to shake things up, and here's how we're going to do it.

Introducing Google Baraza

Yesterday, Google launched its newest Africa-centered product in Ghana, and I had the opportunity to play an active role in the festivities. Google Baraza is a community-based Q&A service that was created specifically for the African continent. As I've outlined in my previous posts on Google's strategy in Africa, one of the big obstacles to a thriving Internet ecosystem in Africa is the lack of locally relevant content. Baraza lets African users work around this issue by posing their questions  directly to other Africans and encouraging a community of users who both provide and acquire value from the product. At this point, you're probably wondering what makes Baraza special/different from all the other Q&A services out there, why the name Baraza, and most importantly, what sort of launch activities I got to participate in yesterday.

Perched at a Tipping Point: Let the Price Wars Begin

Over the last several weeks, technologists in Africa have begun to see an extraordinary phenomenon starting to take place across the continent. Price wars have begun. In Kenya, consumers have seen a 30% reduction in broadband prices, a 50% - 75% drop for calling, and a shockingly high 94% decrease for SMS. Similar trends have emerged in Ghana last months with the first real price war in calling and SMS and bandwidth prices plummeting by up to half. But this sudden new occurrence begs several questions: Why now? Who will benefit? And how does Google fit in?

Our Strategy in Africa Part II: Eliminating Barriers to Access

A few weeks ago, I outlined Google's overall strategy in Africa and mentioned that three posts would follow doing deep dives on each of the central components: access, relevance, and sustainability. This entry will tackle the first issue. Access is still a monumental hurdle, and probably the most significant one, to developing a thriving Internet ecosystem in Sub-Saharan Africa. High quality connectivity is extremely expensive and very hard to come by. Google has a plan for helping the people of Africa overcome this challenge though.

Getting African Businesses Online

Yesterday I spent the day with two colleagues from Google at the West Africa Trade Hub ICT Conference. The two other Googlers, Eve and Estelle, and I gave training sessions for small business owners from Benin, Togo, and Ghana to help them develop basic web presences with Google Sites. It was fascinating to work with these small exporters, some of which did not speak English or had never used a computer or the Internet before. By the end of the day, over a dozen small enterprises were online with email addresses and easy access to their content, but the SME owners weren't the only ones who left better for the experience. As you might expect, we probably learned just as much from them as they did from us.

Our Strategy in Africa

First of all, full disclosure, everything I discuss in this series of posts has been approved for external dissemination by the PR folks at Google, so you're not getting any insider information from me. That said, obviously this comes with my own personal commentary, so that's something! The plan is to write four posts about Google's objectives and strategies in Africa; this first one will be a general overview and the next three will be deep dives into each of the obstacles we're seeking to overcome. Here goes...

TEDxAccra: A Day of African Luminaries

On Monday morning, many of the world's great thinkers and doers gathered in solidarity around the world to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the unveiling of the UN Millennium Development Goals. This worldwide event was termed TEDxChange, styled in the format of the TED conference, and convened by Bill and Melinda Gates on behalf of their foundation. In an open letter, Melinda declared the aim of the gathering to be "to reflect on the Millennium Development Goals ten years in, and to look forward to where we’ll be [by 2015, the MDG deadline]."

Very luckily for me, I got to be a part of this movement, this moment in time.

Broadband Dongles & Malaria Pills

Since I got to Ghana, two technologies have become especially important to me, one that we in the high tech industry would normally perceive as "technology" and one that we wouldn't. The two things I'm talking about are mobile broadband dongles and anti-malaria pills. Within my first few days here, these two objects became essential parts of my daily life, though obviously for drastically different reasons.

Can Voice Messages Replace SMS in Africa?

This is the question posed by Professor Eric Brewer and his team at Berkeley. Eric is a Visiting Scientist at Google, and I had the privilege to chat with him last week while I was in New York. One of the subjects we touched upon during the conversation was a study his team had done last year, implementing a new system of asynchronous voice messages in rural Uganda to supplement voice calls and text messaging (Heimerl et al, 2009). SMS (i.e. text messaging) has become hugely popular in Africa for several reasons: low cost, asynchronicity, and the unreliable cell phone coverage. Let me unpack each of these components.