Silicon Valley Looks to Cash In on Africa's Mobile Growth

http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/tcrmag/2014/05/2014-05-09d-tcrmag.mp3

We here in California love our smartphones. And it turns out that Africa does, too.

That continent has witnessed a mobile explosion in the last few years — in fact, the fastest mobile growth in the entire world. As more and more Africans get connected, Silicon Valley is taking notice. The high-tech titans are edging in, trying to figure out how to get in on the game over there. Senegal, a country that well represents Africa’s growing middle class, is a key test site for high tech.

Digital Appetite

It's a bright, sunny morning in downtown Dakar. And I flag down three friendly-looking teenage girls.

They're hovering around a smartphone — not a flip phone. And I ask Rezina Gerba what kinds of things she likes to do with it. She gives me the universal look for “duh” and explains, “Like everybody else, I send text messages with it. I make calls. I listen to music.”

I ask the girls to play me a song. They take out “Drunk in Love” by Beyonce. It's the exact same song I've been playing — on repeat — since I left San Francisco.

In that moment it hits me: While the cabs of Dakar are more beat-up than the ones back home, the cabbies are texting-while-driving. While the wireless signal is way more shoddy, the kids are downloading songs whenever they're connected. Our appetite for digital life is basically the same.

Cell Phone Alley

I turn the corner into a dingy, cluttered alley. It’s the gray market for mobile phones.

At the entrance peddlers are selling diamond-studded iPhone cases, right by a classy statue of a busty woman on a bike.

This looks nothing like the Apple Store. But the narrow stalls, squished side by side, are stocked with the latest phones. They're not all coming in through official channels. Vendors here fly to Europe, pack suitcases and bring them back. There's also a lot of Chinese knockoffs that go for 70 bucks US — about what a teacher here makes every week.

Vendor Aziz Abdou Salam Sy has had his stall for years. He tries to hustle me. We all know technology loses value as soon as you buy it. But smartphones are so hot, he says, they make a great investment — just like gold!

“If you have extra cash and you don’t want to burn through it, you can buy a phone and store your money that way,” Sy says. “Then if you need cash, you can always sell it again.”

Silicon Valley on a Humanitarian Mission?

The mobile explosion in sub-Saharan Africa came as a surprise. In the 1990s, Western aid groups talked about communal computing — village cyber cafes where businessmen could work by day and village children could Web-surf by night.

Now nearly one in three people has a mobile phone, and smartphones are a lot cheaper than desktops.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, says, “If you’re an aspirant to the middle class, one of the first things you’re going to do is move from a dumb phone to smartphone.”

Silicon Valley has noticed.

Mark Zuckerberg isn't just the CEO of Facebook.com. He's also the founder of Internet.org — a nonprofit he started last year to spread the Internet around the world. He describes the mission as a humanitarian one.

"I mean here we use things like Facebook to share news and catch up with our friends,” he recently told CNN. “But there, they're going to use it to decide what kind of government they want, get access to health care for the first time ever."

Not every tech titan buys his philanthropic intent. Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who funds African health and education initiatives, has said of the Internet campaign: “As a priority? It’s a joke.”

Dr. Eric Goosby, a public health expert at UCSF, is less critical.

"I'm happy that they're rising up and saying how are they relevant to this burden of disease on the planet,” he says. “"But I'm prepared to say they're not going to get anywhere without aligning it with knowledgeable people."

Goosby has been on hundreds of missions to Africa. He welcomes all hands on deck. And even if the motivation is commercial too, that's OK. But, he says, the digital superhighway doesn't bypass the need for real roads, real schools and real experts on the ground. "The connectivity doesn't replace the interaction with a person at a moment of crisis."

Google Guy: Let's Leapfrog

The question now is not if Africans will use mobile more, but how.

Google has a tiny outpost in Senegal. Tidjane Deme is the head of it. After studying abroad and running a failed startup, he returned to his native Dakar.

In the early days of this office, he’d call his colleagues in Mountain View and they’d kind of hang up on him. '"Hmmm you say you're from Dakar. We have an office there? Let me check," Deme recalls.

In Silicon Valley, tech companies have gated campuses. Here, IBM and HP are in the same downtown office building. The scene is so small, they’re literally next-door neighbors.

Deme shuts the door, sits on a giant beanbag chair, and lays out his theory about mobile growth. In sub-Saharan Africa, most young people live in cities now.

"They are really cosmopolitan. They're watching premiere league soccer games or the last Beyonce clip,” he says, “but they're also watching comedy, film TV series made by a local creator. So they really consume an interesting mix of local and international content. And Internet should not just be about half of their life. It should be about all of their life."

That means they need way more local content — especially video content. When Deme compares the written word — typed or SMS texted — versus the video form, "I know without doubt that video form will win."

Given illiteracy in Africa, visual makes more sense. And also, much like the rest of the world, Africans like to see themselves online.

This will require much better broadband connection, not just 2G and 3G signals. So the mobile operators have to step up.

"We are more likely to leapfrog in the digital age if we go straight for high-quality Internet bandwidth rather than if we go and build crappy Internet as we have crappy roads," he says.

Google data show there's pent-up demand. So Deme says, each company investing in mobile stands to cash in big time.

His theory has a provocative edge. I ask him if it’s unethical to push an Internet connectivity strategy in which people who do not have clean drinking water are paying for digital life.

He says without pause, “We should definitely not be telling people you're too poor to get the benefits of Internet. I think that would be ethically wrong."

Local YouTube Celebrities

A growing number of local artists agree with him.

Take the stars of Journal Rapp — an edgy news show that’s kind of like the "Daily Show," except they rap the news. They're capitalizing on the mobile economy.

For years and years, host Xuman Mactarfal says, he'd see corrupt politicians squandering tax money. "They’re buying luxury cars. And without even hiding. All of that was on TV. It was put on TV"

When he and his partner tried to get on TV, producers shut the door. The show's rhyming format was kind of weird. And the government wouldn't appreciate the content. So the rappers aired their pilot on YouTube. And on that very same day, “by 7p.m. TV called and said, 'Yeah guys, we got your contract.’"

So now they're on TV and online. And when Google makes money from ads, they get their cut — much like Beyonce.