Africa’s technology ecosystem continues to emerge, so too are discussions of its impact on the continent’s politics.
A sub-Saharan African IT boom is running parallel to several years of significant growth and investment in the region’s economies. There are now roughly 200 African innovation hubs, 3,500 new tech-related ventures, and $1bn in venture capital that have all fed into a movement of tech-oriented entrepreneurs in the continent’s key economies.
South Africa’s long-established IT sector is making investments across the continent, Kenya’s Silicon Savannah has improved east Africa’s broadband capacity, and Lagos’ Macaulay Road is a hotbed for Nigerian incubators and startup activity.
Africa’s tech scene and improving ICT infrastructure are producing greater digital connectivity, novel innovation, and a new IT business constituency. In turn, these are altering the continent’s political landscape.
Kenya at the forefront
Crowdsourcing app Ushahidi is a seminal case for how homegrown tech is shaping political space. In late 2007 Kenya’s inconclusive presidential election led to a political standoff and sporadic violence throughout the country.
Four technologists – Juliana Rotich, Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh, and programmer David Kobia – quickly developed the Ushahidi app. The name means “witness” in Swahili. The goal was to digitally, and publicly track, incidents of political violence. Much of the data was aggregated from citizen texts and emails.
Ushahidi was heavily used by Kenyan authorities and humanitarian groups during the 2007-2008 election crisis. The app is partially credited for a reduction in the conflict, which eventually led to a power sharing agreement and resolution to the impasse between candidates Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.
“We created Ushahidi to create a voice for people who did not have a voice, and to make sense of information in a faster way, which is good for elections,” says Erik Hersman, one of Ushahidi’s creators.
Mr Hersman, along with his Ushahidi cohorts, went on to build the app into a global software company while founding Nairobi’s iHub innovation space in 2010. iHub has grown to have thousands of members, and is seen as a nexus for the region’s tech scene.
The improvement of broadband capacity following the completion of the TEAMs undersea fiber optic cable has been critical to these IT developments and others in east Africa over the last five years. The cable arrived in Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, in 2010.
Thanks to TEAMs and other IT infrastructure upgrades, internet penetration in Kenya jumped from less than 10 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in 2013. TEAMs also extends broadband gigabit capacity to the other east African countries including Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania.
By 2013, Kenya had formed its own fully staffed ICT Authority. Along with other tech supportive countries such as South Africa and Botswana, Kenya’s national commitment to ICT policy set a precedent for sub-Saharan Africa’s governments.
National and regional efforts are fast connecting Africans to the world’s digital grid. According to the International Telecommunications Union, the continent’s internet users doubled between 2010 and 2014.
Mobile broadband connections rose from 2 percent in 2010 to 19 percent in 2014. And mobile operator association GSMA projects Africa’s smartphone ownership will increase from 72 million in 2013 to 540 million by 2020, with the number of high speed 3G connections rising to 57 percent.
Changing the political process
In many parts of the world, most recently in Arab Spring countries, greater access to the internet and digital platforms changed the political status quo. However this has not always happened in ways predicted or intended by digital activists.
Egypt’s recent arc from authoritarian rule to revolution to fractured democratic government, and back again, is a case in point. Could access to technology foment political change on a similar scale in other countries in the region?
So far, the impact in sub-Saharan Africa has been to increase transparency, and the outcomes have been more benign than the dramatic events in north Africa. Erik Hersman points to tech’s role in disseminating political news quickly.
“In Kenya’s latest elections [in 2013], technology changed the dynamic by becoming an intermediary for more information flows. More information was traveling digitally and now everyone was getting it faster,” he says.
“Ushahidi was used as a way to keep an eye on the election process. Where social media apps like Twitter and Facebook were, [that was] where the conversation happened.”
Kenya’s 2013 presidential contest brought another close result, but the election remained relatively stable compared to the chaos of 2007.
The election also incorporated two additional facets of technology into the political process: the use of social media by candidates’ campaigns, and the use of tech platforms including biometric polling and digital vote tallies to conduct the poll.
In west Africa, Nigeria’s historic May 2015 presidential contest between incumbent Goodluck Jonathan and challenger Muhammadu Buhari had similar features. Most strikingly, for the first time in the country’s history, an incumbent president was defeated and conceded an election peacefully.
Nigerian media site TechCabal underscores the prevalence of technology in multiple facets of the country’s elections – from biometric polling and Nigeria’s own mobile monitoring apps, to the candidates’ use of online crowdfunding and social media for their campaigns.
TechCabal editor Bankole Oluwafemi credits tech-based balloting and reporting for creating stability in 2015, in contrast to the unrest that has beset Nigeria’s past elections.
“As state electoral commissions were releasing results, people were able to compare and corroborate that data in real-time, and that reinforced trust in the process,” he says. “This probably contributed to the fact that there was no violence because the process seemed to be pretty transparent.”
Mr Oluwafemi also points to the role of digital media in the country’s electoral process, as Nigeria’s lively and prolific traditional media outlets move online. He credits the shift to bolstering local media’s ability to provide in-depth coverage of the election process.
“One of the things we saw in the elections was [that] local media had more to say than foreign media, perhaps for the first time. It was not just CNN and the BBC that were covering events. There was much more and better local coverage that was happening in real time online and reaching more geographic areas,” he argues.
In previous elections, network coverage largely aligned with the government narrative and was more tightly controlled. Now, grassroots activism have combined with digital platforms and citizen reporting to disrupt centralised narratives.
“In the 2011 elections social media political activity like Occupy Nigeria on Twitter and Facebook took the government by surprise. By 2014 activists, the political opposition, and the government were all using it,” Mr Oluwafemi notes
Diaspora support
During Nigeria’s march to the polls, much of that digital traffic in news and information was dissecting the shortcomings of President Jonathan’s government – especially on allegations of corruption.
Stories like the country’s former central bank governor blowing the whistle on $20bn in missing oilmoney and the kidnapping of more than 200 school girls in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria, by militant islamist group Boko Haram, fuelled continuous outrage, debate and campaigning online.
While traditional media played a role, digital investigative media operating outside Nigeria were central to exposing theses stories. Many analysts believe this onslaught of open criticism led to Goodluck Jonathan’s defeat.
Sahara Reporters, founded by Nigerian journalist Omoyele Sowore, operates in New York under the umbrella of US legal protection. The site drove a torrent of critical online journalism at the Jonathan administration, exposing graft that led to the resignation or firing of members of Jonathan’s cabinet.
In a 2015 interview, Mr Sowore credited his investigative leads to digital platforms: “The corruption, and who is perpetrating it, is [sic] generally well-known and the evidence easy to distribute through social media and devices. We just need a safe place to report it from, and the rest often takes care of itself.”
CEO and IT activist Marieme Jamme believes technology’s ability to deliver more accurate statistics will also serve as an increasingly powerful influencer in Africa’s political dialogue.
“In the past, and to some extent today, much of the data we used to evaluate the performance of governments, politicians, or economies in Africa was either inaccurate or unavailable,” says Ms Jamme. Now, however, “data is becoming a currency in Africa upon which everything will be evaluated”.
To this end, Ms Jamme is involved in the tech-driven Accur8Africa initiative to build “the statistical capacity of institutions” and “data-driven decisions” in all facets of African governance.
A business constituency
Another impact of Africa’s growing IT ecosystem on politics is the potential influence of the tech sector as a new political constituency. This is only logical as the industry grows.
In the US and EU, for instance, the tech industry is a formidable force in the halls of government, and its lobbyists at the centre of cutting edge debates about regulation, taxation, innovation and privacy.
Across Africa, most of the movement’s emerging leaders were educated and worked in the West before returning to the region.
All four Ushahidi founders have US academic and IT experience. So too do Nigerian e-commerce pioneers such as MallforAfrica’s Chris Folayan, Konga’s Sim Shagaya, and Africa Courier Express’ Tunde Kehinde.
These repatriated, digitial native entrepreneurs join a number of local startup heads and young African technologists. Together, they are merging into a recognisable demographic – and one with different expectations of governments than may have existed in the past.
These can be political aspirations related to greater transparency and democratisation. But increasingly, industry concerns are beginning to coalesce. It is likely only a matter of time before they get better organised.
Africa’s growing ranks of smartphone owners and digital media consumers are looking for greater broadband connectivity. Tech leaders are vocal about the need for Africa’s governments to provide better ICT infrastructure and IT business incentives. Nigerian startup heads frequently bemoan the additional overhead costs they face due to the country’s poor transportation grid and intermittent electricity.
Though sub-Saharan Africa’s IT business associations or formal lobbying activities are hard to identify as of yet, as the industry grows it is unlikely that its leaders will sit idly on the sidelines of politics.
“We do not have a government representative [or] lobbyist yet, but we are considering it,” says Ushahidi’s Erik Hersman.
He points out that with 16,000 members, iHub is already becoming a base for voicing industry concerns. He anticipates that the political weight of these needs will only grow as the sector expands its reach and organises.
“Africa is reaching that inflection point where enough people and entities will soon be online that politicians will inevitably have to change the way they do things.”
Source - Africa’s tech movement gets political - This is Africa
A sub-Saharan African IT boom is running parallel to several years of significant growth and investment in the region’s economies. There are now roughly 200 African innovation hubs, 3,500 new tech-related ventures, and $1bn in venture capital that have all fed into a movement of tech-oriented entrepreneurs in the continent’s key economies.
South Africa’s long-established IT sector is making investments across the continent, Kenya’s Silicon Savannah has improved east Africa’s broadband capacity, and Lagos’ Macaulay Road is a hotbed for Nigerian incubators and startup activity.
Africa’s tech scene and improving ICT infrastructure are producing greater digital connectivity, novel innovation, and a new IT business constituency. In turn, these are altering the continent’s political landscape.
Kenya at the forefront
Crowdsourcing app Ushahidi is a seminal case for how homegrown tech is shaping political space. In late 2007 Kenya’s inconclusive presidential election led to a political standoff and sporadic violence throughout the country.
Four technologists – Juliana Rotich, Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh, and programmer David Kobia – quickly developed the Ushahidi app. The name means “witness” in Swahili. The goal was to digitally, and publicly track, incidents of political violence. Much of the data was aggregated from citizen texts and emails.
Ushahidi was heavily used by Kenyan authorities and humanitarian groups during the 2007-2008 election crisis. The app is partially credited for a reduction in the conflict, which eventually led to a power sharing agreement and resolution to the impasse between candidates Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga.
“We created Ushahidi to create a voice for people who did not have a voice, and to make sense of information in a faster way, which is good for elections,” says Erik Hersman, one of Ushahidi’s creators.
Mr Hersman, along with his Ushahidi cohorts, went on to build the app into a global software company while founding Nairobi’s iHub innovation space in 2010. iHub has grown to have thousands of members, and is seen as a nexus for the region’s tech scene.
The improvement of broadband capacity following the completion of the TEAMs undersea fiber optic cable has been critical to these IT developments and others in east Africa over the last five years. The cable arrived in Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, in 2010.
Thanks to TEAMs and other IT infrastructure upgrades, internet penetration in Kenya jumped from less than 10 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in 2013. TEAMs also extends broadband gigabit capacity to the other east African countries including Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania.
By 2013, Kenya had formed its own fully staffed ICT Authority. Along with other tech supportive countries such as South Africa and Botswana, Kenya’s national commitment to ICT policy set a precedent for sub-Saharan Africa’s governments.
National and regional efforts are fast connecting Africans to the world’s digital grid. According to the International Telecommunications Union, the continent’s internet users doubled between 2010 and 2014.
Mobile broadband connections rose from 2 percent in 2010 to 19 percent in 2014. And mobile operator association GSMA projects Africa’s smartphone ownership will increase from 72 million in 2013 to 540 million by 2020, with the number of high speed 3G connections rising to 57 percent.
Changing the political process
In many parts of the world, most recently in Arab Spring countries, greater access to the internet and digital platforms changed the political status quo. However this has not always happened in ways predicted or intended by digital activists.
Egypt’s recent arc from authoritarian rule to revolution to fractured democratic government, and back again, is a case in point. Could access to technology foment political change on a similar scale in other countries in the region?
So far, the impact in sub-Saharan Africa has been to increase transparency, and the outcomes have been more benign than the dramatic events in north Africa. Erik Hersman points to tech’s role in disseminating political news quickly.
“In Kenya’s latest elections [in 2013], technology changed the dynamic by becoming an intermediary for more information flows. More information was traveling digitally and now everyone was getting it faster,” he says.
“Ushahidi was used as a way to keep an eye on the election process. Where social media apps like Twitter and Facebook were, [that was] where the conversation happened.”
Kenya’s 2013 presidential contest brought another close result, but the election remained relatively stable compared to the chaos of 2007.
The election also incorporated two additional facets of technology into the political process: the use of social media by candidates’ campaigns, and the use of tech platforms including biometric polling and digital vote tallies to conduct the poll.
In west Africa, Nigeria’s historic May 2015 presidential contest between incumbent Goodluck Jonathan and challenger Muhammadu Buhari had similar features. Most strikingly, for the first time in the country’s history, an incumbent president was defeated and conceded an election peacefully.
Nigerian media site TechCabal underscores the prevalence of technology in multiple facets of the country’s elections – from biometric polling and Nigeria’s own mobile monitoring apps, to the candidates’ use of online crowdfunding and social media for their campaigns.
TechCabal editor Bankole Oluwafemi credits tech-based balloting and reporting for creating stability in 2015, in contrast to the unrest that has beset Nigeria’s past elections.
“As state electoral commissions were releasing results, people were able to compare and corroborate that data in real-time, and that reinforced trust in the process,” he says. “This probably contributed to the fact that there was no violence because the process seemed to be pretty transparent.”
Mr Oluwafemi also points to the role of digital media in the country’s electoral process, as Nigeria’s lively and prolific traditional media outlets move online. He credits the shift to bolstering local media’s ability to provide in-depth coverage of the election process.
“One of the things we saw in the elections was [that] local media had more to say than foreign media, perhaps for the first time. It was not just CNN and the BBC that were covering events. There was much more and better local coverage that was happening in real time online and reaching more geographic areas,” he argues.
In previous elections, network coverage largely aligned with the government narrative and was more tightly controlled. Now, grassroots activism have combined with digital platforms and citizen reporting to disrupt centralised narratives.
“In the 2011 elections social media political activity like Occupy Nigeria on Twitter and Facebook took the government by surprise. By 2014 activists, the political opposition, and the government were all using it,” Mr Oluwafemi notes
Diaspora support
During Nigeria’s march to the polls, much of that digital traffic in news and information was dissecting the shortcomings of President Jonathan’s government – especially on allegations of corruption.
Stories like the country’s former central bank governor blowing the whistle on $20bn in missing oilmoney and the kidnapping of more than 200 school girls in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria, by militant islamist group Boko Haram, fuelled continuous outrage, debate and campaigning online.
While traditional media played a role, digital investigative media operating outside Nigeria were central to exposing theses stories. Many analysts believe this onslaught of open criticism led to Goodluck Jonathan’s defeat.
Sahara Reporters, founded by Nigerian journalist Omoyele Sowore, operates in New York under the umbrella of US legal protection. The site drove a torrent of critical online journalism at the Jonathan administration, exposing graft that led to the resignation or firing of members of Jonathan’s cabinet.
In a 2015 interview, Mr Sowore credited his investigative leads to digital platforms: “The corruption, and who is perpetrating it, is [sic] generally well-known and the evidence easy to distribute through social media and devices. We just need a safe place to report it from, and the rest often takes care of itself.”
CEO and IT activist Marieme Jamme believes technology’s ability to deliver more accurate statistics will also serve as an increasingly powerful influencer in Africa’s political dialogue.
“In the past, and to some extent today, much of the data we used to evaluate the performance of governments, politicians, or economies in Africa was either inaccurate or unavailable,” says Ms Jamme. Now, however, “data is becoming a currency in Africa upon which everything will be evaluated”.
To this end, Ms Jamme is involved in the tech-driven Accur8Africa initiative to build “the statistical capacity of institutions” and “data-driven decisions” in all facets of African governance.
A business constituency
Another impact of Africa’s growing IT ecosystem on politics is the potential influence of the tech sector as a new political constituency. This is only logical as the industry grows.
In the US and EU, for instance, the tech industry is a formidable force in the halls of government, and its lobbyists at the centre of cutting edge debates about regulation, taxation, innovation and privacy.
Across Africa, most of the movement’s emerging leaders were educated and worked in the West before returning to the region.
All four Ushahidi founders have US academic and IT experience. So too do Nigerian e-commerce pioneers such as MallforAfrica’s Chris Folayan, Konga’s Sim Shagaya, and Africa Courier Express’ Tunde Kehinde.
These repatriated, digitial native entrepreneurs join a number of local startup heads and young African technologists. Together, they are merging into a recognisable demographic – and one with different expectations of governments than may have existed in the past.
These can be political aspirations related to greater transparency and democratisation. But increasingly, industry concerns are beginning to coalesce. It is likely only a matter of time before they get better organised.
Africa’s growing ranks of smartphone owners and digital media consumers are looking for greater broadband connectivity. Tech leaders are vocal about the need for Africa’s governments to provide better ICT infrastructure and IT business incentives. Nigerian startup heads frequently bemoan the additional overhead costs they face due to the country’s poor transportation grid and intermittent electricity.
Though sub-Saharan Africa’s IT business associations or formal lobbying activities are hard to identify as of yet, as the industry grows it is unlikely that its leaders will sit idly on the sidelines of politics.
“We do not have a government representative [or] lobbyist yet, but we are considering it,” says Ushahidi’s Erik Hersman.
He points out that with 16,000 members, iHub is already becoming a base for voicing industry concerns. He anticipates that the political weight of these needs will only grow as the sector expands its reach and organises.
“Africa is reaching that inflection point where enough people and entities will soon be online that politicians will inevitably have to change the way they do things.”
Source - Africa’s tech movement gets political - This is Africa