Futures of Technology in Africa (EN)

Exploring all aspects of futures of technology in developing countries with a time horizon of two decades in a meaningful manner is beyond the scope of most organizations, including STT. There are two possible escape routes from this impossibility. The first is limiting the focus to a specific region, industrial sector or type of technology, at the cost of comprehensiveness. The second is to apply broad brush strokes, providing an overview at the cost of precision and depth. The choices we made in combining the two strategies are based on four months of literature research and several dozen conversations with experts on technology and development with business, government and academic backgrounds. This section explains the choices we made.

In STT foresights, these choices are not pre-determined before the launch of a project. It is the first task of an STT project leader to identify the most promising niche and reformulate the project focus accordingly. These niches promise a relevant contribution to the understanding of the future interaction of technology and society, making use of the strengths of STT. These include the capacity to build new knowledge networks of personally committed high-level experts with a wide range of backgrounds, and to explore an issue flexibly, creatively and independently. The niche should also be of relevance to Dutch society, whether this be business, government, academia or civil society. And STT’s niches are often neglected by other organizations at the time of their formulation.

The possibility of not applying a regional focus was ruled out very early in the project. We did not expect to deliver meaningful results while working simultaneously on four continents in networks that would first have to find common ground across multiple cultural barriers. A global focus would have forced the project towards a level of abstraction at which its practical relevance would have been compromised.

Between the options, there were many reasons

to focus on Africa. During the last decade, Africa has outgrown the world economy and, despite the recent financial crisis, this trend is projected to continue in the future. For some technologies Africa even exhibits the highest growth rates in the world, mobile communication being the most prominent example. Africa really is rising. Despite these developments, the global technological gap is most persistent, poverty is denser than elsewhere and less is known about technology in Africa when compared with other developing regions.

The combination of a highly dynamic region with excellent opportunities for development on the one hand, and a desperate need to improve the quality of life for a large part of the population on the other, makes Africa an exciting and worthwhile project target.

This impression was confirmed in conversations with experts on development and technology. Without previously mentioning a regional focus, most experts used examples from Africa to explain their arguments. When asked directly which, if any, regional focus should be applied, the overwhelming majority chose Africa, more specifically Sub-Saharan Africa. The latter focus was applied because North Africa is economically and technologically much more integrated with Europe. Also, the drivers of technological change, opportunities and threats differed substantially between the regions north and south of the Sahara. Most international organizations categorize Sub-Saharan Africa as Africa without Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia and Western Sahara and we follow that definition in this book, unless mentioned otherwise. We also neglect the specific issues concerning Africa’s small island states.

The focus on technology is part of STT’s core mission to explore futures of technology and society. When applied to Africa, this focus delivers interesting results. Africa is mostly understood in terms of its problems (the crisis stereotype) or in terms of its wild beauty (the exotic stereotype). The technology perspective is useful to see beyond these stereotypes, to reframe Africa. It makes the recent economic successes of Africa tangible and opportunities for future development visible. In addition, it brings with it new actors and new networks. Large technology companies, for example, would have considered Africa a non-market a few years ago but are now committing to the continent. Software companies are increasingly building programming skills in Africa and learning from local innovators. And because Africa’s population pyramid still deserves the name, technology adoption is progressing faster than elsewhere. Beyond all of this, technology does save and extend lives. The avail ability of clean drinking water, of reliable electricity, of access to communication and transport services does increase life expectancy, as health education and entrepreneurship benefit. Chapter 3 explores the technology aspect in more depth.

STT projects don’t have clients, safeguarding the independence of the foresights. Nevertheless, one of the criteria for the decision to dedicate a foresight to a specific topic is that the results should be relevant to ‘someone’. With respect to the future of technology in Africa, the following groups were considered as primary targets: businesses, NGOs, academia and government. Each of these groups could be addressed in the Netherlands, in African countries or on a global or multilateral level. In the end, business became the most important focus of the project. The reasons for this are twofold: first, businesses are the major driver of large-scale technological change; and second, businesses are the most curious to learn about the future of technology.

On a continent where public investment in research and development significantly lags behind every other world region, businesses become the major drivers of technological change by transferring global technology to Africa. Also, the willingness of businesses to invest resources and capacities in a particular technology in relation to Africa is one of the better indicators for what will happen in the medium-term future. Among the plethora of concepts and ideas that seem to address the needs on the continent, those with major financial backing and those with many competing companies heading in the same direction are those most likely to blossom.

During conversations and interviews, businesses, both in Africa and in the Netherlands, were also most eager to learn about the future of technology and seemed most likely to act on the results. STT foresights thrive on this curiosity and commitment, which lead the participants to share their insights. Several managers argued that they needed the bigger story to convince their superiors to take Africa more seriously as an emerging market. This story is emerging at the present time and this STT foresight contributes a large chunk to it, a chunk that has been relatively neglected for too long. This focus fits perfectly with STT’s excellent business network, as well as its policy of taking up an issue for not more than three years and then launching the results through other organizations.

This choice does not imply that this book is irrelevant for non-business readers. On the contrary. NGOs are increasingly co-operating with businesses to leverage their impact and to achieve their goals. The business focus stimulates this interaction. Also, NGOs, be they foreign with a stake in Africa or local, are increasingly faced with a type of change that requires business-like responses. For example, NGOs need to plan strategically for the rapid changes in the communication landscape. They need to invest their resources diligently in projects that are most likely to deliver, taking into account future uncertainties. And development projects without an economic feasibility are unlikely to work beyond a local scale. For the same reasons, the Dutch government is also strengthening its economic relationship with Africa, while weakening classical aid programmes. As for African governments, the quality of governance in African countries is without doubt the most important factor influencing the future of Africa. However, the possible leverage of a foreign and independent foresight project on African governments seemed overambitious.

This book is the most tangible of the project’s results. Its aim is to make you think again about Africa and how you see Africa, wherever in the world you are. Its purpose is to make you question your and our ideas about Africa. The book adds a technology voice to a global conversation, in which cultural, economic, political, institutional, intellectual and many other voices are also taking part, bringing about a richer image of modern-day Africa. The book is best understood as a journey. We meet and listen to technology and other pioneers, facilitators of change, sceptical experts, intellectual visionaries, cheetahs and hippos (we will come back to what they stand for in Chapter 1). We visit hot spots of technology and explore future successes and failures.

The book is not a comprehensive inventory of technology in Africa. Those looking for a detailed, quantitative overview of sector-specific information and related forecasts will be disappointed, though they might find valuable nuggets. For the current state of technology and short-term trends, other organizations with a pan-African reach and expert partners in all technological sectors produce reports and databases with rapidly increasing quality. References to these are listed among the ‘Recommended sources’ at the end of most chapters. Neither is the book as a whole a work of science. No overall hypothesis is being formulated, let alone tested and many of the sources, and their analysis would not stand up to commonly accepted scientific criteria. This book is not objective. The interviewees were selected based on their position, their expertise and their ability to think creatively and abstractly. Innovative trends received more attention than well-known ones, businesses more than NGOs. Countries to visit were selected on the basis of their potential to be technology pioneers on the continent. We went where the change is quickest, where the future seems closest and, more than once, where chance brought us. It is one of the luxuries of an STT foresight that serendipity is allowed to unfold its powers.

To interpret this book it is helpful to understand the sources on which it is based: visits on location, interviews, conversations, workshops, quantitative data and literature studies.

Visits on location, interviews and conversations The most important source of all for any STT foresight lies in people. For the past three years, we have initiated hundreds of conversations on futures of technology in Africa. These can be divided into several groups. In the first phase, open dialogues dominated the project, meetings with anyone with any link to technology in Africa, ranging from world traveller to science fiction author, from self-employed web designer to director of a multi-national, from creative thinker to globally renowned expert, from refugee to ambassador, from activist to minister. Questions included: What do you think about when you think about technology in developing countries? Which questions should this project seek to answer? How does your work or expertise relate to the technology and development? What changes would you put your money on? Who else should be involved and which literature is a must-read? These conversations established and formed the project and resulted in a diverse network that has carried the project along.

Once the shape of the project was emerging, conversations moved from personal conversations to public discussions. Forums of debate included NGOs, such as a workshop at the 2009 1% Event in Amsterdam; academic research, such as a panel debate on ethics, technology and development led by a consortium of the three technical Universities in the Netherlands (3TU); businesses, for example a strategic session with TNO’s in-house Flying Innovation Team; and governance, for example a presentation and top-level discussion at the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands (SER), among many others. These events were always two-way exchanges. The project’s ideas and preliminary findings would be presented and feedback would be given, on content, possible sources and partners, similar projects elsewhere, and so on.

The third kind of conversations, formal and informal interviews, were taking place during visits on location in Kenya, Uganda, Rwandan, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. Informal interviews were mostly used to learn about country-specific information, to connect people, to gain access to local networks, to allow serendipity, to be surprised. Formal interviews primarily delivered in-depth information on specific issues or technology domains, long-term visions and ambitions, personal insights on what the future might bring and questions to be followed up. The formal interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed. In this book, quotes without a reference stem from these interviews. Chapter 10 is based almost exclusively on such interviews, as is a large part of Chapter 8. However, any opinions expressed may be biased by the choice of specific interview segments and by the context in which they are placed. The author of this book is solely responsible for the content and any mistakes and misjudgements.

Interviewees included the following people:

Kenya

• Salim Amin, Chairman at A24 Media, Nairobi
• Julie Gichuru, Group Digital Business Manager and Talk Show Host at Royal Media Services, Nairobi
• Wambura Kimunyu, an African writer, observer, thinker and dreamer, Nairobi
• Ahmed Sheikh Nabhani, Kiswahili Consultant at the Swahili Cultural Centre, Mombasa
• Nicholas Nesbitt, CEO at KenCall, Nairobi
• Edwin Nyanducha, Founder of Inkubate Ltd, Nairobi
• Dr Sheila Ochugboju, Senior Communications and Outreach Officer at ATPS, Nairobi
• Dr Ahmed Yassin, Director at the Research Institute of Swahili Studies of Eastern Africa, Mombasa

Uganda

• Dhizaala Sanon Moses, National Planning Authority, Kampala
• Andrew Mwenda, Managing Editor of The Independent, Kampala
• Erostus Nsubuga, CEO at Agro-Genetic Technologies Ltd
• Prof. Jospeh Obua, The Inter-University Council for East Africa, Kampala
• Dr Dorothy Okello, Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), Kampala
• James Segawa, Medical Equipment Consultants Ltd, Kampala
• Group interview at the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO), headed by Dr Ambrose Agona, Kawande

Rwanda

• Anonymous energy expert at the Ministry of Infra-structure, Kigali
• Anonymous infrastructure planning expert at the Ministry of Infrastructure, Kigali 

South Africa

• Simon Camerer, Executive Head of Marketing at Cell C, Johannesburg
• Simon Dingle, technology journalist, writer, broadcaster and professional speaker, Johannesburg
• Anonymous lead partner Sub-Saharan Africa at a global strategy consultancy, Johannesburg
• Clifford Foster, GBS Partner and Chief Technology Officer at IBM, Johannesburg
• Arthur Goldstuck, Director of World Wide Worx, Johannesburg
• Tanja Hichert, Scenario Planning practitioner and facilitator of strategic conversations, Hichert & Associates and Research Associate at the Institute for Futures Research, Stellenbosch University
• Rafiq Philips, Web AddICT and Marketing Technologist, Cape Town
• Tony Surridge, Senior Manager Advanced Fossil Fuel Use at SANERI, Johannesburg
• Paul Vorster, CEO at the Intelligent Transport Society (ITS), Johannesburg

Nigeria

• Prof. Michael Adikwu, STEP-B National Project Coordinator, Abuja
• Josh Asanga, Port Manager at the Lagos Port Complex, Nigerian Ports Authority, Lagos
• Adeyemi Fajingbesi, Technical Advisor to the Minister of National Planning on Vision 20:2020, Abuja
• Jason Hurter, Managing Director at Fugro Offshore Survey, Lagos
• Prof. Abdulkarim Obaje, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at the Federal Ministry of Education, Abuja
• Olatunbosun Obayom, founder of the Bio Applications Initiative, Lagos

Ghana

• Andrew Tonto Baffour, President of the Ghana Institution of Engineers (GhIE), Accra
• Kofi Bucknor, Managing Partner at Kingdom Zephyr, Accra

During interviews and conversations, most people will find it difficult to think about long-term futures from a cold start. Asking a person point blank what the world or their field will look like in 2030 is unlikely to produce worthwhile results. Therefore, each interview was held following the same six-step open structure, designed to lead the interviewee as smoothly as possible from thinking about the present to thinking about the future.

• After a very short introduction to STT, myself and the project, interviewees were invited to introduce themselves, their field of work and what it has to do with technology. The result is a snapshot of the interviewee’s expertise in relation to technology in Africa.
• A time dimension was introduced in a second set of questions by asking for changes observed during the past five years in the field discussed. This established an understanding of the speed of change, as well as indentifying some drivers or obstacles of change.
• A third set of questions explored whether these or other changes could be expected to continue for the next five years and what the consequences would be. This established the first step into the future, providing many leads as well as an inventory of the medium-term expectations of the interviewee.
• In a fourth set of questions, the time horizon was gradually extended. Possible trend breaks were explored, as was the scale of change possible within a decade or two. This phase focused very much on the broader effects of technological change. Questions included: How will a trend affect your life and the lives of your fellow citizens?What will the country look like ten years from now, if this or that development takes place? What other trends would it interact with?
• A fifth set of questions triggered interviewees to formulate their own long-term Utopia and the obstacles to getting there. What is the best scenario one can imagine and what stands in the way of getting there? These questions often led to very personal conversations about values, hopes and fears. They taught me about the internal motivation and ambition of an interviewee.
• Two questions ended each interview. The first was what the West should learn from Africa; the second, whom else I should meet. The first question was often met with bafflement, smiles and a long silence before an answer was given. The second question allowed me to serendipitously discover new interviewees guided by the local expertise of people who knew my questions and interests.

Businesses are usually reluctant to share their insights and activities. This is generally the case, but holds even more in the context of Africa. Doing business in Africa makes Western businesses vulnerable to negative publicity, even if an activity contributes to development. Therefore most companies with a stake in Africa have a Corporate Social Responsibility presentation in which they highlight their support of a local health or education project or a marginal product in their range, specifically targeted at local development.

In order to overcome this and bring about a process of mutual learning, STT partnered with the Netherlands-African Business Council (NABC) in organizing the Discover the Lion workshop series. Each workshop would focus on one technology-intensive commercial sector and bring together between 30 and 50 business representatives, hosted by a generous business partner: IBM hosted workshops on energy, ICT, water and logistics; FrieslandCampina on food; PTC+ on agriculture; and the Technical University Delft on business models. A set of short presentations by industry experts was followed by two hours of group discussions. In this peer-to-peer setting, the participants were happy to share their motivations, their expectations, their concerns, their needs, their questions. These discussions provided valuable guidance in identifying less visible aspects of technology in Africa. Results of these workshops are available at www.stt.nl/DiscoverTheLion.

A different type of workshop was the FutureLab workshop in February 2010 in Kenya. This brought together ten of East Africa’s most creative thinkers. In an intensive one-day workshop, we explored futures of East Africa with a time horizon of 20 years, based on a rapid foresight method. The workshop tested many of the preliminary project results and embedded them in different plausible future cultural, political, economic and environmental contexts. The results of this unique event can be found in Chapters 8 and 9.

The availability of quantitative data on Africa is relatively low. And where data is available, it is often of doubtful quality or outdated. The most comprehensive sources for Pan African data per country are the World Bank’s ‘World Development Indicators’, the IMF’s ‘World Economic Outlook Databases’ and its derivative, the ‘Regional Economic Outlook Sub-Saharan Africa’, and the ‘African Economic Outlook’, published by the OECD and the African Development Bank. These sets cover a wide range of economic, social, environmental, institutional and technological indicators and their development, mostly up to two to three years ago. In addition to these overviews, industry-specific global organizations, such as the International Telecoms Union (ITU) or the International Energy Association (IEA), publish useful data. Also, market research companies are increasingly covering Africa in sector-specific research briefs, often including short-term projections.

The data in all of these sources is subject to a high margin of error, even more so the data for least developed countries, smaller economies or countries in conflict. Governments often lack the institutional capacity to measure even key indicators, such as the size of the population or the economy. Especially in rural areas, population numbers are rough estimates, at best. Economic data now frequently includes the unofficial economy, but with pure cash, subsistence or barter economies, numbers remain very rough. As different methods are used for these estimates in different countries and by different organizations, comparability suffers even more. In addition, for many indicators there is an incentive to over- or underestimate. A region might want to appear poorer to receive extra support or richer to prove good governance. The Penn World Tables, a world-standard compilation of income data, ranks countries with grades A to D by the quality of their data. While industrialized countries mostly score straight As, nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries get a grade of C or D, corresponding to a margin of error of 30 to 40%.

As a consequence of these data problems, even the present is analytically a part of the future, with most of the same uncertainties. Many characteristics of data on Africa violate important conditions for sound statistical analysis. Projections into the future based on extrapolations or regression models are especially problematic. Their value is illustrative more than exact. Decision makers used to basing their assumptions on rich and accurate data should take into account extreme uncertainties and biases. Even improving data can cause problems, for example ghost trends: if an indicator has been consistently underestimated, an increase in accuracy in itself will result in an upward trend; overestimation will result in a downward trend.

And data quality is improving. One cause of this lies in more and better tools to collect data, ranging from satellite images for refining population estimates to crowd-collected data through mobile phones. For the informal settlement of Kibera in Nairobi, for example, population estimates were adjusted from 1 million and more to a current 170,000 in Kenya’s latest census, triggered by detailed research. Also, as companies expand their stakes in Africa, they are dedicating extra resources to improving data availability and quality or outsourcing this to independent service providers. For governments, the main incentive to improve their data capacity is the establishment of functioning tax systems. Overall, we can look forward to significantly better and richer data with smaller margins of error on Africa in the coming years.

Throughout the project, a continuous literature study was executed. This ranged from scientific journals and reports to blogs and newspaper articles. As the project evolved, the content of the sources screened converged more and more on the issue of ‘technology and futures’. The publications contributed many of the arguments and examples in this book. Many of the authors were contacted and ended up contributing their knowledge, and several of the initiatives found in the publications were taken up in the itinerary of the visits on location.

Few people will read this book cover to cover, but most readers with an interest in Africa will find valuable information within it. The book can largely be divided into four parts, each with its own character and purpose:

• The first three chapters are mostly of interest for those interested in the motivation and process of long-term thinking in general and on Africa and technology specifically. Chapter 1 sets the stage with an overview of Africa in the 21st century in terms of economic development, population growth and the change in lifestyles accompanying both. In Chapter 2, guest author Geci Karuri-Sebina provides an overview of futures studies in and about Africa. Chapter 3 focuses on the exploration of global technological futures in relation to African futures.
• Chapters 4 to 7 are of most interest for those with a hands-on interest in Africa. They explore futures of ICT, energy, infrastructure and agriculture, respectively. Each of these chapters provides an overview of the state of technology, major trends and applications, future uncertainties and open questions.
• Chapters 8 to 11 are of most interest to readers with a strategic interest in Africa, those with a long-term stake. The information gathered in Chapters 4 to 7 is integrated and put into the broader context of societal futures in Chapter 8, based on interview transcriptions from six African countries and a set of scenarios developed in an accelerated scenario planning workshop in Nairobi.
• Chapter 9, with a major contribution from guest author Sheila Ochugboju, discusses the neces-sity of a societal awareness of and discourse on technological change. Reasons for stimulating this discourse include the improvement of societal choices about technological futures and the facilitation of an African transition from technology consumer to technology innovator. Chapter 10 turns the tables and explores lessons for the West to learn from Africa, based on interview excerpts. Chapter 11 provides a short overview of future changes and contains guidelines for the present on how Western organizations can become future proof and take part in Africa’s future.
• Wambura Kimunyu’s science fiction story, ‘The Last Infirmity of Noble Minds (an excerpt)’, ends the book. The story provokes us to take a long view with an Afrocentric perspective. Stories are a powerful way to explore the future and looking beyond the horizon of all we know is an efficient means of thinking out of the box. As this book is being published, a follow-up project of collating a book of African science fiction stories is being discussed.