Surprising Africa: Interview with Ethan Zuckerman

In at least one remote Malian village that lacks even TV reception, people gather in living rooms to watch shows downloaded from the Internet. The IT development organisation Geekcorps gave the village its first Internet connection, via satellite; the locals did the rest.

“These guys built a box to attach to your TV that receives a data signal via wifi and converts that information,” recalls Ethan Zuckerman, Geekcorps’ founder, who has visited numerous African villages dispensing IT help. Now, rural Malians who used to be stuck with DVDs and videotapes can sing the next YouTube hit along with the rest of the wired world.

In other villages, radio stations that Geekcorps hooked up to the Internet used it to transmit as well as receive news. For instance, villagers were soon emailing community leaders in nearby cities to announce local festivals, boosting attendance. “People found themselves building businesses on this ability to transmit on the Internet and then broadcast locally,” Zuckerman says.

These are two small examples of the ingenious ways Africans are using IT to solve problems. Most of these stories don’t make it to the West. The bigger ones – mostly involving mobile telephony – do get some play in the foreign media. Zimbabweans made news around the world this year when they used phones to monitor the violence-wracked elections.

“Activists were able to get tallies from each polling place and call them into the office of the opposition party MDC,” says Zuckerman, who follows events in Africa as the co-founder of Global Voices, a blogger-driven website that carries news from around the world. Thanks to mobiles, Zimbabwe’s opposition party knew within hours that it had won the first round of the election. Its presidential candidate withdrew from the runoff, citing intimidation. But the truth was out. “Individual citizens empowered with technology can be a very powerful force for transparency,” says Zuckerman.

The Western media have also reported on another mobile phone-driven transformation in Africa: mobile banking. In most countries, people can now make purchases and transfer money using a menu on their phones. Gone are the days of moving cash via eight-hour bus trips and expensive courier services, which the majority of Africans, unable to get traditional bank accounts, used to be stuck with. The savings in money and time are enormous.

Though Westerners know about mobile banking and election monitoring, Africa generally gets little foreign media attention. It was this fact that led Zuckerman and former CNN journalist Rebecca MacKinnon to found the website-cum-international newsroom Global Voices. Both had joined the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a Harvard think tank, in 2004. Soon after, they founded Global Voices, which now has about 200 paid and volunteer bloggers and staff around the world.

Blogging itself is another example of how Africans are using technology to effect change. Citizens use blogs to get news out to the rest of the world – including during January’s 24-hour media blackout during Kenya’s disputed election. “A lot of Kenya’s bloggers took the street and started taking pictures of demonstrations and conflicts with police” and interviewing both sides, Zuckerman recalls. “For about 24 hours, it was the only source of news.”

Africans’ creative uses of technology not only counter negative stereotypes of the continent, they also hint at its receptiveness to simple, efficient everyday innovations.

Its problems, though, often require locally specific solutions rather than ones imported from outside. Foreign businesses can help by providing entrepreneurs who’ve made it through the first stage with the management and capital they need to move to the next level. There’s “an opportunity to find people doing innovative work on the ground in these countries and partner with them,” says Zuckerman. He recalls the story of Congolese Wireless Networks, the country’s first mobile provider, which was ultimately bought by Vodafone.

But he suggests that Western companies get involved earlier in the process, “rather than at the end, when someone has already created a great deal of value.” In his view, industries with potential include mobile banking and journalism, small-scale agricultural production, and the grading of agricultural products for export.

“One of the things to consider in going into these markets is it’s all about partnerships,” he adds. “It’s very difficult to work by yourself because you just don’t know enough about how Africa works.”

That could soon change, though, if African bloggers and mobile users have anything to do with it.

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