A short day, consisting primarily of registration and one and a half sessions. The fault is in travel - by the time a room was available for me at the Hotel half the day was gone. At any rate, I caught the tail end of an interview with some CNN guy, and then went to a session called "The Best Innovation is in Africa", by Toby Shapshak.
It was ok, nothing groundbreaking. I took a few things from the session, which to be honest focused almost exclusively on the revolution the mobile phone is bringing to Africa. Toby put it well by saying that Africa skipped the desktop computer right into the mobile phone (reminiscent of how India largely skipped industrialization right into IT). At any rate, almost all the innovation he talked about was telco related, which, while truly impressive, is not telling the whole story. But more on that later.
Another important talking point is that innovation is happening in Africa because there they have real life-and-death problems they need to solve. In the west we are working on problems of convenience, so it's less impressive innovation.
Most of the focus was mobile money - the prevalence of using mobile phones to pay for pretty much anything. The main payment system over mobile is MPesa, which accounts for 80% of the mobile transactions in East Africa. The amount of transactions they do a year adds up to 40% of Kenya's GDP. He said he had encounters with beggars, who asked for money in MPesa, and an official attempting to get a bribe using it. It's simple, fast and available, so it's ubiquitous.
By the way, the feature phone is still huge in Africa, although smartphones are growing. Still, feature phones are super cheap, have a battery that can last a month, and come with useful features like radio and flashlight. The battery life is important because charging the phone is expensive, and you can't do it everywhere. Here too innovation springs up - he talked of a $200 solar panel sold on payment plan, which allows people to charge their battery on it, light up the house and even sell electricity to their neighbors.
Another clever use of the mobile is MFarm, which allows farmers to group together to get better leverage in buying material and selling product. Again, since this is all done in SMS, it's super easy to use.
One more interesting example he presented was an incubator for premature babies. He said that NGOs would ship out modern western incubators to clinics and hospitals, but those would not be able to afford the parts if anything went wrong with them. So someone designed a more suitable incubator, where all the mechanical parts are made of Toyota car parts (most popular brand), so it's easy to get. The heat is generated by a pair of headlamps, they put the car fan there, and so on. Very innovative.
What he did not talk about (and what I was hoping to hear more about was infrastructure architecture: Given Africa's _massive_ infrastructure deficits, what innovation is going to disrupt this field? For example, drones are going to circumvent the lack of roads. I would have loved to hear more things like that.
Over all, not bad.
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