At the moment, tech events are almost a dime a dozen around here. Mobile Africa, AITEC banking technology, IHub launch, and so on, and so forth. So many, in fact, that I recently had to tell ICT Board CEO Paul Kukubo that the reason why I had missed out on a couple of ICT events was really quite mundane: I need to get some work done. Need to earn some money. I have no idea how the other conference hoppers do it, but I had deadlines and clients. But of course I keep scanning what’s going on. So not very long ago, I stumbled over a Tech4Africa conference. Ah, another one, I thought. Let’s see what that lot is planning, and whether they are rounding up the usual suspects.
Not quite, I found out. Interestingly, they didn’t even seem aware that there were usual suspects. Because the speaker list did not have a single African individual, or single individual doing tech in Africa – it was a merry line up of US Americans. So is their assumption that ‘Africa’ needs tech done for it because there are no Africans, or people working in Africa, who can do tech in some shape or form?
A bit ticked off, I emailed the organiser and asked whether they intended to have any African speakers at all. ‘Yes, of course’, was the reply, days later. And also: ‘Anyone you would suggest?’ I was on the verge of writing a snippy email back that it was them, not me, who were organising the conference, and that I’m not a techie, so surely they’d either know some people, or would have done their homework and received a few recommendations. But since it may not always be good policy to bite people’s heads off, I wrote back with two suggestions.
Had they been reading the media a little attentively, they would have probably stumbled across not just an African, but a Kenyan venture that has attracted an ever growing amount of attention: Ushahidi , the crowdsourcing platform that emerged from the post-election violence, and has since been deployed for election monitoring in India, to report drug shortages in Africa, and in the earth quakes in Haiti and Chile. Earlier this month, it was featured in the New York Times , which is fantastic publicity and got Kenya some positive attention, and attention that had nothing to do with colonial-romance sundowners and elephants.
Ushahidi are effectively one of the prime suspects to invite for a tech event. And yet, in an interview with Macharia Gaitho , Ory Okolloh, one of the founders, alludes herself to why I would, in fact, reluctant to put forward Ushahidi for yet another conference presentation: At least to date, Ushahidi is a non profit, financed by grants, and in that interview, Ory herself has been critical of how ICT around here is often very focused on ‘development’ rather than being run as a commercial venture.
ICT for development, or ICT4D, is a thriving sub-sector of the overall Doing Something About Africa movement. And the ICT4D people are, by profession, very vocal in the online space, whether on blogs or Twitter, websites or Facebook – sometimes to the extent that I wonder how they can afford to run around at all the conferences all the time. When they set up to rummage around for a positive Africa story, many international media then pick up on these efforts. So if you are a cursory observer of all things African, and not, say, a business analyst, then your image of ICT in Africa will be dominated by such social ventures. What happens to people who run plain-vanilla regular technology firms?
My buddies Ehi Binitie and Kofi Dadzie from Rancard Solutions in Ghana , who work with media firms like the BBC, with Google, and with banks and other corporates, who send invoices to corporates rather than grant applications to foundations, do not seem to have generated the same amount of media excitement yet. Or my buddies from MTechComm in Nigeria who don’t come across as very developmental at all, but have been quite happily doing mobile value added services, WAP portals, sms campaigns such as the Tusker Project Fame, and also successfully gone public?
Ushahidi has also showed that technology can make borders irrelevant: Ory Okolloh is still living in South Africa, Erik Hersman, Ushahidi co-founder, only moved to Kenya recently, the programmers could have worked anywhere (and did), and in crisis situations where Ushahidi is deployed, volunteers can and do contribute from anywhere. Is it then still African technology? Or just technology that works in Africa, and elsewhere, too?
So the next time someone asks me for suggestions for conference speakers, I’d like to have more suggestions for entrepreneurs – dull, boring, old-school, in-it-for-the-money entrepreneurs – who do ICT business in sub-Saharan Africa. Who employ people, not volunteers, who pay taxes rather than apply for tax exemptions. Like anywhere else in the world. Or, ideally, not be asked for suggestions because the organisers of Tech4Africa conferences have already done their homework, and dug a bit deeper than the non-profit ICT4D.
Republished with kind permission from the Star.
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