MAMADOU NDIAYE grew up in Senegal.
His parents were “not poor, but not rich”. He was fascinated by mathematics,
which he studied at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar and then taught for
several years in Côte d’Ivoire, saving to pursue his dream of studying in
America.
He went to New York, where he worked
at Staples, an office-supplies chain, to finance his masters in statistics at
Columbia University. A customer, impressed by Mr Ndiaye’s sales advice,
suggested that the Senegalese apply for a job with his own employer, IBM. That
was 15 years ago. Now Mr Ndiaye is back home, as manager of the office Big Blue
opened in Dakar last May.
The office in Senegal is just one
sign that IBM believes Africa will bring in billions. It is no newcomer: it sold
its first gear there to South Africa’s railways in 1911 and a mainframe
computer to Ghana’s central statistics bureau in 1964. Lately it has been
paying special attention to the continent.
In July 2011 it won a ten-year, $1.5
billion contract to provide Bharti Airtel, an Indian mobile-phone company, with
information-technology services in 16 African countries. Since mid-2011 it has
set up shop in Angola, Mauritius and Tanzania, as well as Senegal. In all, it
boasts a presence in more than 20 of Africa’s 54 countries. Last August it
opened a research lab in Nairobi, one of only 12 in the world. And between
February 5th and 7th Ginni Rometty, its chief executive, and all who report
directly to her met dozens of African customers, actual and prospective, in
Johannesburg and the Kenyan capital. It was, Mrs Rometty said, the first time
the whole top brass had assembled outside New York since she became the boss
just over a year ago.
Big Blue may be ahead, but it is not
alone. Last month Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, spent a week in sub-Saharan
cities. He enthused about Nairobi, which, he wrote, “has emerged as a serious
tech hub and may become the African leader.” Orange, a French mobile operator,
and Baidu, China’s answer to Google, recently introduced a jointly branded
smartphone browser in Africa and the Middle East. Orange also sponsored this
year’s Africa Cup of Nations, a football tournament, in South Africa. (Nigeria
won it, beating Burkina Faso in the final on February 10th.)
This month Microsoft, which has
offices in 14 African countries, unveiled a smartphone to be sold in several
African markets. It is made by China’s Huawei and uses Microsoft’s new
operating system.
In Kenya Microsoft intends to bring
broadband to places that do not yet have electricity, using solar power and
“white spaces”, or spare broadcast-television frequencies. Within a year, says
Fernando de Sousa, the general manager for Microsoft in Africa, 6,000 people in
the Rift Valley will have access to broadband. Similar projects are planned
elsewhere. Since October Microsoft has been running “app factories” for
programmers in Egypt and South Africa.
Mark Walker of IDC, a research firm,
says that in the past three or four years multinational companies have adopted
a “completely fresh approach”. They have “a lot more skin in the game:
investing in local people, so there’s proper knowledge transfer, investing in
country offices.” Companies are in it for the long term now, rather than
quitting after a bad quarter or two.
Africa’s chief attraction is that it
has been growing while richer regions have stalled (see chart 1). Its
demographic prospects are promising, too. As America, Europe and China age,
Africa can expect a bulge of workers in their productive prime. Though skills
are in short supply, they are becoming more abundant. According to the McKinsey
Global Institute, the consulting firm’s research unit, in 2002 only 32% of
Africans had secondary or tertiary education, but by 2020, 48% will have. The
continent can call on degree-laden expatriates such as Mr Ndiaye and Uyi
Stewart, the Nigerian chief scientist of IBM’s Nairobi lab.
Some countries are better off, more
stable or simply keener than others to make the most of IT. Kenya may be
keenest. In 2006, frustrated by the slow progress of a regional plan to lay a
fibre-optic cable along the east coast of the continent, Kenya negotiated its
own link to the United Arab Emirates. The Gulf cable landed in 2009. The
regional link, in which Kenya remains a partner, followed the next year.
The lion’s byte
Bitange Ndemo, a bigwig in the
Ministry of Information and Communications and the man responsible for the
cable from the Gulf, says he wants to see a rise in IT’s share of Kenyan GDP
from about 5% now to 35% “within a very short period”. He hopes for a mighty
shift of employment away from agriculture. “But politicians must have the
will,” Mr Ndemo says.
If they are to create new markets
and to profit from them, technology companies have to be on the spot. John
Kelly, IBM’s head of research, says that after the firm set up labs in China in
1995 and in India in 1998, “we found that we were getting innovation out of
those research labs which could only have occurred in those locations.” The
Indian lab, for example, produced the “spoken web”, for illiterate people with
cheap phones.
One of the Nairobi lab’s early
challenges is traffic. The city has few traffic lights or cameras; hence the
awful congestion. Signals from motorists’ mobile phones can help to track
traffic, but planners have few data to work with. IBM’s lab will harness other
sources, such as security cameras that are not aimed at the road but capture
images of it anyway. IBM will then crunch all the data to help planners control
traffic and decide where to build more roads.
The Nairobi lab is expected to earn
its keep quickly. The Chinese and Indian labs, Mr Kelly says, took ten years to
make a significant contribution technically and commercially. Kenya’s target is
five. He says the lab has made a good start, drawing on work by an older
sibling in Tokyo to tackle its traffic problem.
In many sectors, such as health
care, education and water, as well as traffic, governments are sure to be
important customers for IT companies. But private clients matter too,
especially in telecoms and finance. The mobile phone, the first computer many
Africans will own (see chart 2), is the bridge between the two.
To Westerners, “mobile banking” is a
new way of doing something old. To many Africans, it is the obvious way of
doing something new. In Kenya M-PESA, a system of transferring money over
phones, is an everyday, reliable utility. Equity Bank, a fast-growing bank,
most of whose customers have never had an account before, has come of age with
mobile technology: its chief executive, James Mwangi, says his customers can
use any of its 54 products on the move. For technology companies, all this
means a growing demand for many things: reliable connectivity; software;
analysis of data on spending, lending and repayment; and data centres.
Technology companies say they are
keen to serve smaller businesses too. Microsoft has announced a programme
called SME4Afrika, which is intended to bring 1m small and medium-sized
enterprises online. Mr de Sousa points out that technology can also draw
informal businesses into the formal economy. The ability to use software,
computing power and storage online “as a service”, paying only for what you
need and only when you need it, may put the cost of information technology
within the budget of many small African businesses. “The person who invented
the cloud did it for Africa,” says Mr Ndiaye of IBM in Senegal.
Mr Kelly makes a bolder claim,
linking Africa’s emergence to that of “big data”. IBM’s answer to how the world
can cope with the rising torrent of exabytes is “cognitive computing”. Instead
of being given detailed instructions, cognitive computers are fed masses of
data and use statistical analysis to answer complex questions. Watson, IBM’s
first of this kind, was clever enough to win “Jeopardy”, an American television
quiz show, beating human champions hollow. The true purpose of a Watson,
however, is not to show off on television but to sift data from radio
telescopes or provide medical diagnoses.
From Jeopardy to epidemiology
Mr Kelly sees an opportunity “for
Africa to move, and move first, to this new era of computing.” It can leapfrog
straight to the tech frontier, without worrying about adapting old systems to
cope with the data it creates. At the Catholic University of Eastern Africa,
which will eventually be the new lab’s home, a Kenyan asked Mr Kelly, “Will you
bring Watson to Africa?” Yes, he replied, if someone suggests a problem for it
to solve. Mr Ndemo spoke up: “Let us bring Watson here in nine months.” Africa
has plenty of problems. Computing power can help Africans solve them.
