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Ratio Blog: Mobile Culture Clash

Wednesday, 10 February 2010

The writing was on the wall – the Twitter stream threatened to drown out the lone Safaricom rep at the Mobile East Africa conference. Andrea’s weekly column for the (Nairobi) Star.

It was a Nairobi calculation: I was planning to attend the Mobile East Africa conference downtown, but decided that I would strategically skip the opening speeches. Too much rush-hour traffic going that direction, and typically too little substance in the contributions by the political appointees. So I turned up fashionably late, wriggling my way through the participants to find a seat and for a moment, I wondered whether I was in the wrong event: Was this the mobile conference, or did I accidentally walk into what seemed like a Safaricom hate fest? What was going on?

Like everyone else, I have cursed Safaricom before. That’s normal. In a calm and collected moment (i.e. not when on deadline whilst my ISP is denying the issues they clearly have, just to admit two hours later that yes, regrettably, there had been problems), I try to cultivate a philosophical attitude to my local service providers and the Kafkaesque maze that is their customer service. I try to take it as a given that there is none, or that it may be well intended, but at best confusing: Friends reported getting intriguing text messages from the second operator in the market that alerted them to ‘Your total balance as of 01/02/10 is kshs. 0 which is above 60% of your Credit Limit.’ Say what? And this not specific to the telecoms sector, either: In Nairobi, I have only dealt with two companies that have consistently offered me proper customer service, and they both revolve around keeping my ancient Merc on the road.

So I was aware of some online grumblings over download speeds, but what had gotten up everyone’s nose at the conference? I listened for a while and turns out that it was a bit of a mix, and didn’t have anything to do with customer service: That Safaricom’s revenue shares on value added services were unfair, that Safaricom didn’t allow access to their systems, that they weren’t taking developers seriously, and why didn’t they open up M-PESA across networks because wouldn’t that be nicer?

I tried to disentangle the different points over lunch: One of my tech CEO friends said yes, they can be difficult to do business with in areas that would require access to their system, but shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t seem unduly worried, but then he is the pragmatic sort anyway and rather than rant, he goes off to find an alternative solution. Others at my lunch table seemed horrified when I said that I would have told people to fly a kite when they suggested opening up M-PESA to other networks. Why should they? They have the largest market share anyway, it’s their product, and they have a business to protect. ‘But we’re a developing country!’. So? The woman looked at me wide-eyed and said …’You sound a bit …’ ‘What? Capitalist?’

I guess that was the culture clash behind this discussion: The conference was a mix of people who were in the mobile industry running companies for straightforward commercial objectives, techies, and those in the ‘ICT for development’ (ICT4D) space. I have followed the contradictions between these groups on the sidelines for a while: Many young programmers and developers have smart technical ideas – but often little understanding how to turn them into a business proposition and how to deal with corporates. And ICT4D people also often little commercial thinking: they tend to focus on the public good they aim to create, and don’t exploit the clearly present commercial potential in mobile services, not just amongst the higher-income demographics. Ultimately, this limits how much they can achieve: Run something as a non-profit and the scope of your services is limited by how many donations you receive to run your service. Run it as a for-profit, and the scope of your service is driven by your profits. I’m still not quite sure what a social entrepreneur is, but if you’re interested in providing services to a large number of poor people, try making money with it: The much-maligned Safaricom is a good example with the huge number of low-income clients who they provide with communications and financial services. You just won’t be able to be nice all the time.

However, both the techies and the ICT4D people are, by definition, tech-savvy and so very noisy online: The conference being a mobile conference, the room was full of people armed with smart phones and laptops, and the Twitter stream projected against one of the walls conveniently showed all the comments on the session, too – not just to the room, but to the online world. As far as their operations go, Safaricom can take or leave this crowd, no harm done – but in the online sphere, their representatives were clearly outnumbered by their voices.

Republished with kind permission from (Nairobi) Star.

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