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Finding Innovation in Africa
"In the past couple of years, barely a month goes by before you see a headline on some economist magazine like "Africa Rising". Chinese investors and American tech companies have begun to set their sights on sub-Saharan Africa, like popular high school cheerleaders mercilessly eyeing the new girl in school, trying to decide if they want to make friends. They're gauging whether there's enough money in Africa yet to extend their markets there -- smartphones and Facebook and all the baubles of modern consumer capitalism.
But the impression that I get, from the Africans whom I have spoken to and whose blog posts and articles I've read -- is that nobody there is necessarily interested in Facebook or Uber or any of Silicon Valley's other bright and shining stars. In many cases, their cultural values are simply not the same as ours...but they also want to build their own tech startups, their own economy. If they can do this, they'll pull off a trick that has eluded much of Africa for the past four hundred years: keeping money flowing back into their own economies, instead of pouring into the hands of Westerners who seem determined to keep African nations as helpless client states, often run by corrupt regimes who serve as nothing less than pimps for the minerals and other resources they hold ruthless stewardship over."
Disclosure: I've known Josh for over a decade, and he's a damn'd good writer. You may have read his adventures getting teeth pulled in Mexico on huffpo.
"In the past couple of years, barely a month goes by before you see a headline on some economist magazine like "Africa Rising". Chinese investors and American tech companies have begun to set their sights on sub-Saharan Africa, like popular high school cheerleaders mercilessly eyeing the new girl in school, trying to decide if they want to make friends. They're gauging whether there's enough money in Africa yet to extend their markets there -- smartphones and Facebook and all the baubles of modern consumer capitalism.
But the impression that I get, from the Africans whom I have spoken to and whose blog posts and articles I've read -- is that nobody there is necessarily interested in Facebook or Uber or any of Silicon Valley's other bright and shining stars. In many cases, their cultural values are simply not the same as ours...but they also want to build their own tech startups, their own economy. If they can do this, they'll pull off a trick that has eluded much of Africa for the past four hundred years: keeping money flowing back into their own economies, instead of pouring into the hands of Westerners who seem determined to keep African nations as helpless client states, often run by corrupt regimes who serve as nothing less than pimps for the minerals and other resources they hold ruthless stewardship over."
Disclosure: I've known Josh for over a decade, and he's a damn'd good writer. You may have read his adventures getting teeth pulled in Mexico on huffpo.