How Africa is forging its own digital destiny

It’s common to hear debates about whether digital sovereignty is a pipe dream for Africa. Scholars write with great passion and concern about the dangers of the continent’s infrastructure being largely controlled by tech giants, leaving the continent overly dependent on imported technology and know-how.?

But I think we’re asking the wrong question. And here’s why.

The value of the global mobile wallet is a trillion dollars, and 70% of that comes from Africa. You read that right: 70% of a trillion dollars’ worth of transactions come from Africa.

How? Because Africa runs on digital. The continent has some 515 million unique mobile users , of which more than 50% are smartphone users. In Africa, digital isn’t a thing – it’s everything. And it’s the way we’ve overcome the continent’s legacy.

You see, we don’t trust cash in Africa as much as other regions. Instead, people are doing touch-to-pay, pay-send and money-send on top of emerging digital currencies. In Africa, we seem to be bypassing (at speed) the legacy of cash and traditional banking. We are leapfrogging over some of these steppingstones - we never knew about some of them, so maybe we won't miss them?

Leapfrogging is starting to become somewhat of a thing - In my home country of South Africa, we have a National ICT white paper that sets out the concept of a national digital society. Arguably, policy or not, the COVID-10 pandemic fast-tracked digital as the primary channel of engagement and transactions across the world.

And that’s how Africa is leading its own destiny, because we’re not playing by anyone’s rules. We have overcome the continent’s legacy using digital. We’ve built bridges, conduits, we’ve connected Africa into a networked business model, Africans conceived and built M-Pesa, and we’re putting services on top of that. I believe Africa is on the rise, precisely because we aren’t encumbered by legacy.

When you consider that digital is everything – that it is the de facto way the world works – you start to think in terms of possibility. And really, anything is possible. Africa is solving problems for itself because it’s in control of its digital destiny. I think that’s a very positive way to think about it: we are unencumbered by some of the bureaucracy, the policies, the diplomacy – and so we get things done.

I’ll give you some examples.

Esoko is a Ghanaian start-up that began in 2008, providing market prices over SMS to smallholder farmers on development projects. Today they connect more than one million farmers to essential services like weather forecasts, agronomic advice, market linkages and insurance coverage over a range of channels including SMS, voice SMS and call center.

Uganda’s Rocket Health helps 3.8 million patients with chronic diseases to comply with their treatment plans, offering telemedicine consultations through different channels (chatbot, phone, video calls, SMS) in different languages.

Nzola Swasisa from the DRC invented Lokole , a small portable email device in 2017 – it’s a solution for residents of rural African areas who have limited access to digital communication. When connected to a power point, it allows a maximum of 100 users within a 25m radius to connect and get access to Wi-Fi for email and is about 100 times cheaper than internet data.

In Kenya, people had to go get what they call clearance certificates in order to come to the TransUnion offices. If you live in a rural village or take a taxi into town it can take hours – which is tough for the elderly, for instance. So we looked at how to develop something that uses USSD and to deliver your credit report via SMS to you.

And there are so many of these stories – stories Africa is writing for itself.

There’s a meme that does the rounds from time to time showing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with Wi-Fi included at the base of the pyramid. It’s funny, but it’s also instructive – because that really is what the submarine cable around Africa does. It connects us to the world. ?

The real problem that lies on top of that layer, is what we call the last mile problem – getting people connected in the rural areas. If you have a connected world, you can communicate, you can transact. You can build services and new worlds on top of it – businesses, government services.

So, the question we should be asking now is: if we have the base of the hierarchy of needs, what are the layers above it that lead to self-actualisation? What are those things we can now do that will make Africa amazing at what it does? That we can accelerate? What are we doing with digital to accelerate our potential?

It isn’t about digital – digital itself is useless. But Africans are solving numerous problems – making digital useful – because of our sovereignty, our ability not to be encumbered by other ways of thinking.

When we look at examples like Esoko, like Rocket Health, like Lokole and many others, we need to ask ourselves what are we waiting for? We are already leapfrogging our challenges – isn’t that enough proof that we are taking control and solving our problems?

And then the final question is, what more could we be doing to get even closer to being in control of our digital destiny.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.