Africa 2.0

From susu to momo, in the land of fufu

Jan 17, 2023

It was in Ghana in 2001, where I was a Geekcorps technology volunteer, that I realized how backwards Americans were in terms of mobile phone use. My co-workers in Accra were flash calling, buying and gifting airtime to one another, and swapping out SIM cards adeptly. Though I briefly used a very early, brick-like mobile phone in the mid-90’s, I didn’t even own a mobile phone at the time I left for Accra.

We left from JFK Airport, a group of us who had applied to be Geekcorps volunteers and miraculously gotten accepted. Larium, an anti-malarial drug, made some of us including me, slightly hallucinate, so I have a fuzzy memory of meeting Kate and Alisa and Elliot and Kerri and Dan at the airport, trying to memorize their blurry faces, and drinking beers as we waited to board our flight.

By 2000, nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries had mobile services and there were 10 million total subscribers, and by 2021, that grew to 515 million subscribers, and 46% percent of the population had access to mobile phones. When I was first in Ghana, people had feature phones (phones with SMS and voice and some basic apps), but today around 50% of Africans have smartphones.

I worked at Africa Online, at the tallest building in Accra then (four stories high). I helped a stout guy named Mike transition from building the daily newspaper website by hand each day out of HTML to creating a dynamic website using Dreamweaver. When the head of HR first came by my desk to chat, I kept typing Silicon Valley-style as I turned my head a few degrees to talk to him (I had to act busy at all times!) Then I realized, as he pulled up a chair to speak with me, I was being rude here in Ghana, and needed to turn my chair around, stop typing, fully face him, and shoot the breeze with him for a good half hour before returning to my computer.

Lunches were two hours of huge bowls of spicy soup laden with palm oil and fufu and huge floating chunks of goat or grasscutter (a local rodent). I’d go with Eddie, a married member of Ewe royalty, if he weren’t lunching privately with a female friend. He used a feminine username on his AOL Instant Messenger so he could safely flirt.

He would pat his round belly under his embroidered linen boubou.

“Did you think we all were starving?”

Internet connection was still very slow in Ghana at that time. It took ages to send or receive email, and that familiar dial-up squeak and buzz was ubiquitous. Besides the newspaper website, I was also assigned to work with USAID to create websites for Parliament, the Ashante Kingdom, and a local human rights organization.

Geekcorps’ biggest strength was the relationships it created. Yes we were sharing skills, but in the following years when Ghana improved its Internet connectivity, they didn’t need a bunch of Americans going over there to train them or help them build websites - they could train themselves. At the time I was there, you couldn’t use a credit card or buy a tech book or learn much on the Internet because it was excruciatingly slow. So the knowledge sharing then had to be P2P, rather than A2P.

Back in the U.S., I helped organize the BarCamp Africa conference at Google in 2007, spearheaded by Ellen Petry Leanse and Kaushal Jhalla. Guy Kawasaki moderated panels of luminaries from various African countries. The goal of the conference was to create connections between people involved in technology in Silicon Valley and in African countries. Back then there was no Zoom or Facetime, and one of my projects was to connect live to attendees in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa (I think we used Skype?) I was lucky enough to have two men from Ghana Think be among those who joined me to connect to the cohort in Accra - Henry Barnor and Ato Ulzen-Appiah. The video connection flickered in and out, but it was a thrill then to be connecting live across the world.

Henry and Ato went on to lead a series of BarCamps and tech training programs in Ghana, catalyzing local innovation, and both ended up working for Google at various points in time.

After BarCamp Africa, I participated in a conference in Johannesburg for a nonprofit that galvanized developers creating mobile apps for social change, most of whom were from Africa and Asia. They were creating apps to help community health workers collect records in the field, apps to send SMSes to midwives giving them info on how to deal with medical issues, apps to help workers find jobs. Socializing under the moonlight after the conference, I met Jennifer Sly and Gcina Dube, who ran a youth organization in Swaziland. When they asked if I wanted to drive with them to Swaziland that night, who was I to say no? I had left a few days open for serendipity to happen, and here it was. I remember Gcina speeding through the no-man’s-land in the dark to the border to get there before it closed for the night, and then the border guard telling us we were too late, or maybe for a fee he could let us through.

The next day I found myself in a cattle kraal watching the King of Swaziland anoint his new minister. It took hours, and crowds of people kneeled together with no food or water, and the men were allowed to leave first. When some nearby women complained, the police threatened them with a club. This was captured in the Swazi Times, under the caption “Women Causing Trouble.” The next year I went back to help document the first technology conference in Swaziland (now called Eswatini) for Frontline World. Social media is an everyday thing now, but I remember a stunning young Swazi woman named Tibusiso so excited in a session on how to connect with people around the world using Facebook.

Meanwhile, mobile money had become a force, starting with M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007. Africans were already paying each other with airtime, which had become a kind of currency. In 2009, MTN launched mobile money in Ghana (MoMo), which could be used on feature phones through USSD, a GSM protocol that allows menu-based browsing.

One of the people I met through Geekcorps, a young tech visionary named Akwasi from Osu who was teaching kids in rural schools how to use computers, ended up going to the States, and when I was back in California I hired him for his first official tech job.

He moved back to Ghana around 2017.

“You are missing out,” he often told me, as I Facetimed with him on my smartphone from my Los Angeles apartment.

When I lived in Accra, there was only one local fast food restaurant, Papaye, that served heaping plates of chicken and rice. Now KFC was there, along with a bunch of international restaurants and supermarkets and malls. The Dikan Center photography library had opened, featuring 30,000 photography and film books with a special collection of photo books of Africa. The contemporary art scene, which previously had consisted of a lot of brilliant handpainted barbershop signs and custom coffins, had taken off and now there were streamlined galleries such as Gallery 1957 featuring painters of worldwide reknown such as Otis Quaicoe and Joana Choumali. BusyInternet, which was an early co-working space in 2001, transformed into an ISP as more people had their own Internet connectivity and didn’t need to go somewhere to access it.

The startup scene started exploding. The Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), founded in 2008, is a tech entrepreneur training program, seed fund, and incubator based in Accra with the goal of mentoring African startups. BezoMoney, a fintech startup, was one of their portfolio companies. Ghana, with a good percentage of its population still unbanked, and with a strong traditional savings culture based on storing cedis in a wooden susu box, was ripe for banking innovation.

Google Translate has added more African languages such as Bambara, Ewe, Twi. Google has gathered more than thirty griots from Mali who speak Bambara to record stories passed on through the generations, and to help build a language model for Bambara. New initiatives for voice typing will help more Africans to come online.

There are a number of venture capital firms investing in early African startups such as Ralicap (focusing on early stage, emerging markets, fintech), Purple Elephant Ventures (focusing on sustainable tourism), and Tiger Global, and Visa says they will invest $1 billion in Africa over the next five years. McKinsey says Ghana is among the countries that will have payments growth over 20% this year. In 2022, over $7 billion was invested in African startups.

“You have to meet this guy Mubarak,” Akwasi said. “He’s coming to LA for the Summit conference. His company is doing a savings app. He’s the real deal.”

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