I have to admit it’s always exciting to see validation points for strongly held convictions. As you know I firmly believe that the confluence of technology and emerging – or in the new jargon more precisely ‘frontier’ – markets will generate significant and exciting new innovations and opportunities, and I remain convinced that fundamentally new and robust business models will emerge as a result. The fact that this might improve the human condition in some of the world’s heretofore least fortunate corners is of course icing on the proverbial cake. And so I was happy to read that Google, for example seems to share (at least some of my) sentiments on this:
We believe that the Internet is a transformational force for societies. And it’s making us all much more powerful as individuals, regardless of whether one is in New York, Stockholm, Bujumbura, Ouagadougou, or Cape Town. Regardless of background, education, social status, gender, age or economic situation, online access to information enables people to create opportunities for themselves. Seeing a student in a cybercafe doing his research using a search engine, a businessman chatting with a colleague abroad with instant messaging, or a young woman posting her photos to a social networking site – it’s clear the extent to which academic, business and social life is fundamentally changing all over Africa.”
At the same time, a couple of days ago, a very interesting article in the NYTimes also leant support to my thesis that the infrastructural constraints and challenging business environment of sub-Saharan Africa would engender innovative and resourceful approaches and a unique approach to harvesting the potential of information and communications technologies:
Still, Nairobi is home to a digital brew that invites optimism about its chances for creating unusual innovations. The city has relatively few wired phone lines or networked personal computers, so mobile phones are the essential digital tool. Four times as many people have them as have bank accounts. Text messages are far more popular than e-mail. Safaricom, the dominant mobile provider, offers a service called M-pesa that lets customers send money with text messages. Nokia sells brand-new phones here for as little as $33.
While engineers in the United States lavish attention on expensive phones that boast laptoplike features, in Kenya there are 10 million low-end phones. Millions more are used elsewhere in Africa. Enhancements to such basic phones can be experimented with cheaply in Nairobi, and because designers are weaned on narrow bandwidth, they are comfortable writing compact programs suited to puny devices.
“Applications are heavy in America,” says Michael Wakahe, a Nairobi code writer. “Here we have to make them light,” because simpler hardware requires smaller programs. These can have advantages in wireless systems…
…The prospect of marrying low-end mobile phones with the Internet is earning Nairobi notice from outsiders, who wonder whether the city might emerge as a test-bed for tomorrow’s technologies. One intriguing possibility is broadcasting local television programs on mobile phones.
In Nairobi’s highest-profile validation, Google opened a development office here last September. “Africa is a huge long-term market for us,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said by e-mail. “We have to start by helping people get online, and the creativity of the people will take care of the rest.”
One of the most obvious – yet no less powerful or potentially transformational for it – themes is the combination of mobile communications, internet and geo-location technologies to disseminate information and increase connectedness from the bottom up. This emergent collective intelligence is all the more remarkable, given the typical history of entrenched ‘top-down’ politico-economic structures in place in these countries. Much of the early innovation is centered around information gathering and crisis management with tools like Ushahidi (quickly developed in response to the post-election political unrest in Kenya earlier this year) and FrontlineSMS being quickly adopted by citizens and NGOs and having an immediate positive impact on the ground. It doesn’t take much imagination to start dreaming up additional – more commercial – potential applications for these kinds of platforms. Ken Banks, the man behind FrontlineSMS describes his view as developing the ‘long-tail’ of mobile applications as the right approach for not-for-profit “social mobile”:
low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. From my own experiences the number of NGOs present in this space is by far the greatest, making it the area to focus on if we want to create the highest amount of mobile-enabled social change. Add up all the value here, and it easily outweighs the rest along the higher (more lucrative) parts of the tail.
I would suggest that this approach might work equally well to enable commercial, for-profit, applications as well. Indeed on the other side of the continent you find Mark Davies esoko/TradeNet: Africa’s first mobile2mobile peer2peer trading platform and market information network:
…designed to provide the very latest agricultural market information to stakeholders. Accessed via SMS, fax, web, PDAs, farmers and traders can get daily price information, download video/audio files, access research documents, post buy/sell offers to the community, and contact other market participants. The concept is to make african markets more transparent and efficient, improve intra-regional trading, and provide stakeholders with enough recent and accurate information to make better decisions on bringing products to market and at what price.
I’m sure it won’t be easy or without enormous challenges but the opportunity is vast. Africa: it just might be the new new new thing.
I’ve been mulling this over for years, but with the release of the iPhone 18 months ago, it became easier to start to imagine the outlines of this future.
Broad reaching changes will emerge from the bottom up – this recent article from Macworld illustrates some possible examples:
…there’s incredible power in a device that knows where it is and that can purchase stuff based on its location…We already have an example of this power in the form of iPhone-friendly Starbucks outlets. Walk into such a Starbucks and a new Starbucks entry appears within the phone’s iTunes application. Tap it and you can learn what’s recently been played in the store and then purchase one of these tracks simply by tapping a Buy button…
It’s 11 a.m. and time for your coffee break. Leave the office and stroll the 14 steps to the café next door. Your iPhone vibrates and asks if you’d like the usual double-wet cappuccino. Of course you do, so you tap Yes. Within a minute your name is called and you have your caffeine-rich libation in hand. Again, no cash or credit card necessary because your iPhone automatically picked up the tab.
It’s not (yet) as sophisticated, but the success of mobile-based payment systems like M-Pesa in Kenya is not only very exciting but is a precurser to much much more. (I first wrote about M-Pesa in November 2006; seeing opportunities like this with no way to ‘participate’ was a significant motivator in developing my current venture.)
(from the CGAP technology blog:)
Since its introduction in March of 2007, the M-PESA application has had great success all over Kenya. There are currently over 2.3 million registered users. Over 18 Billion Ksh had been moved through the system, via person-to-person transfers.
Some of the work that I have been doing makes several arguments as to why M-PESA has become so popular. Firstly, it is the young, male, urban migrants who are driving the uptake of services – customer adoption. These migrants are what innovation researchers call ‘early adopters’ of a technology. They are usually better educated and earn higher incomes than those in the village. Because these migrants are the senders, they can choose the channel for money transfer…
…Despite these cash float problems, the majority of customers in both the urban and rural areas assert that they prefer M-PESA over other money transfer services. This means that M-PESA must be offering them some kind of substantial benefit. In Bukura, this benefit comes in the form of savings on transport. Customers do not need to travel into Kakamega, the nearest town, to access the service. One elderly farmer commented that “I can just walk from my shamba (farm) and get money. I don’t have to spend and go into town. If the agent does not have cash today, then I will come back tomorrow. It is cheaper to wait”. Finding strategies to manage the cash float problem will undoubtedly be one of the greatest challenges for Safaricom. For now, however, it seems like customers are willing to accept the inefficiencies of the service. It is, after all, cheaper to wait.
One of the revelations (to me at least) of this year’s Supernova conference was Ken Banks of kiwanja.net. For anyone interested in the innovative use of mobile communications in developing markets, his essay “Mobiles in Africa: A Travellers Perspective” is a must read. (Sadly, I didn’t get the chance to meet him as I had to rush off but hopefully I will get a future opportunity.) An exerpt:
When it comes to mobile innovation, the gap between developed and developing countries is not much of a gap at all. Mobile innovation in the West, largely technology-lead, sits in contrast to that in the developing world where combating the geographic, economic and cultural constraints of users is considered a more sensible way to go. This explains the emergence of the torch phone, for users who live in areas with little or no regular light, or multiple phone books for users who share their phones with family members. On the heavyweight side, a plethora of financial applications have hit the streets, with Safaricom’s m-Pesa service getting by far the biggest press to date…
…Innovation is not always as official or formalised as this, however. People in developing countries are rarely simple, passive recipients of a technology, and rarely wait for outsiders to provide solutions to their problems. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, evident by the masses of thriving small businesses you find on the street corners of every village, town and city.
Many developing countries for all intents and purposes have ‘skipped’ the fixed-line telephony paradigm. Wanna bet that they ‘skip’ the branch banking/atm paradigm in retail financial services?
I know it’s not their typical market target, but I’d love to see Apple (or RIM) develop a ‘rugged’ iPhone (analogous to ‘rugged’ mobile hard drives), targeting emerging markets. Not as a competitor / replacement for existing mobile phones, but as a substitute to personal computers: effectively giving traders and business people an effective web appliance (ideally with Skype pre-loaded!)
In a leader this week on banking in Africa, the Economist asks the question “A bank in every pocket?” making the point that “banking on mobile phones holds promise, provided regulators are willing to be flexible”:
Leonard Waverman of the London Business School has estimated that an extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country leads to an extra half a percentage point of growth in GDP per person. To realise the economic benefits of mobile phones, governments in such countries need to do away with state monopolies, issue new licences to allow rival operators to enter the market and slash taxes on handsets. With few exceptions (hallo, Ethiopia), they have done so, and mobile phones are now spreading fast, even in the poorest parts of the world.
I wholeheartedly agree with their point – indeed my post a year ago (!) A Trinity: Finance, Mobile Phones & Africa (from November 11, 2006) made many of the same observations:
It seems clear that mobile phones (as opposed to personal computers) will be the most important device for access and connectivity in the developing world, and probably everywhere eventually. But access to the internet and computing will become more and more common everywhere, with many different initiatives – both technological and financial – focused on bringing down the cost and expanding the market for computing in the developing world.
As has been written many many times before, mobile phones are changing everything. From politics to business to culture. The digital generation is but a subset of the connected generation, a worldwide phenomenon. Again, this is probably being felt more strongly in developing countries – not so much because the effect is greater or different – but because the contrast with what came before is that much more marked. This extension of connectedness enabled by mobile telephony taps into something that is inate in humans; it extends our ability to form communities unbounded by geographical or even political constraints.
The Economist goes on to highlight the flexible, adaptive regulatory approach to mobile banking being taken in the Philippines (something I was not aware of) as a model to emulate:
Rather than trying to work out the best rules in advance, which could hamper innovation, the regulator is working closely with the banks and operators behind the country’s two m-banking schemes. That way the regulator can see what is going on, so the schemes’ operators get more flexibility. The experience will feed into new banking regulations. Rules that are too tight will hinder adoption; rules that are too lax could allow fraudsters to bring the whole idea of branchless banking into disrepute. But if regulators strike the right balance, m-banking may provide the next example of the mobile phone’s transformational power.
In the same edition, “On the frontier of finance” gives a good overview of the state of the banking industry on the African continent, highlight that while recent growth and investment is encouraging, the opportunity remains vast with most of African’s – even in the richest countries like South Africa – remaining unbanked and having no or poor access to even basic financial services.
A couple weeks ago, in a special report in the FT on Tanzania, Tom Burgis wrote a very good article “Crops are starved of lending” on how the lack of access to basic financial services, working capital and markets hold back improvements in agricultural productivity and essentially trap much of Tanzania’s population in a vicious cycle of poverty:
Four in every five Tanzanians live in rural areas; most are subsistence farmers. Eighty-five per cent of cultivated land is still worked with hand-held tools, 10% with animals and just 5% with machines. For a decade, the sector’s growth has failed to match the overall expansion of the economy. Without a transformation in agriculture, Edward Lowassa, prime minister, admitted in a recent speech, there will be no escape from poverty.
…[in a village dependent upon cashew farming] The 1,006 vilagers are unable to bypass what officials say are illegal cartels of traders who keep prices cripplingly low, depriving farmers of capital to reinvest in raising quality and productivity. Their predicament is worsened by the near impossibility of borrowing.
I know that solving problems like these is not easy; that there are many social, cultural, institutional hurdles to overcome (on top of the operational and technological challenges) but it would seem to me that in the next decade or so, there really is a chance to ‘leapfrog’ using cheap, ubiquitous mobile communications and devices as a substrate and deliver the power of modern financial services and markets to every corner of the planet. Even the poorest. Especially the poorest. Indeed the maxim “go where the pain is highest (with respect to introducing new products and services)” means that it is not ridiculous to think that some of the earliest adopters of sixth paradigm markets and techology may well be found in some of the poorest and challenging regions on the globe.
Imagine these villagers armed with mobile phones giving them access to markets, risk management tools (weather, commodity risk), payment systems, and ultimately capital – breaking free from the bottlenecks and information barriers currently trapping them in a vicious circle of poverty. How is that for a big idea? We’re (I’m!) not quite there yet (in terms of being at the inflection point) but we are getting very close. Hey maybe this is worthy of a TED Prize wish in 2 or 3 years from now! 
I am fascinated by the application of modern information and communications technologies to help improve the lives of some of the world’s poorest and ‘infrastructurally challenged’ (don’t know if this term has been used before but seems to encompass the fundamental problem that holds back the people in developing countries from improving their economic prospects.) To be able to succeed (in providing meaningful, affordable, services) in such challenging environments to my mind offers great insights into how improvements can be made to how services are designed and sold in any environment – including the developed and wealthy western markets. A variation on the New York, NY theme of – ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’…
While I have written previously on the impact of mobile telephony on the developing world, and I will try not to repeat myself too blatantly, I thought it was worth highlighting a few more initiatives that have caught my attention over the last few weeks.
Bruno (a prolific source of new and interesting people and ideas) in reporting on the recent TED 2007 conference pointed me in the direction of Jan Chipchase’s post on the Village Phone initiative in Uganda:
the Village Phone extends regular base station cellular coverage from around 15 kilometers to around 30 kilometers through the use of a village phone kit – an antenna and ten meter cable (shown above) and a coupler (shown below) connected to a regular Nokia 1100 mobile phone plus of course, a micro-finance loan. The net result? In a number of cases it provides the first convenient, reliable and affordable connectivity to the outside world for many rural communities as well as providing a stable income for the local entrepreneur that takes out the loan.
He also goes on to mention the development of essential services facilitated by access to mobile communications:
One example of the benefits of connectivity? Sente – the transfer of money via mobile phone that essentially also extends regular banking services such as the remittance of cash to these communities.
Another exciting initiative I stumbled accross (at the excellent Timbuktu Chronicles) is Sevak Solutions “commitment of developing the product specifications, business plans, and financial requirements to create an open architecture transaction system [for microfinance institutions.]” Rather than paraphrase, Sevak Solutions describe themselves as follows:
Sevak Solutions is a start-up initiative that has emerged from a consortium of microfinance institutions seeking to understand the role technology could play in scaling microfinance. Early work demonstrated a need for alternative, low-cost transaction solutions and business models that addressed the needs of microfinance institutions that do not have the client volumes required to afford, or piggy-back on, existing payment systems. Sevak Solutions is focused on interoperability, open architecture systems that can connect to cell phones, point-of-sale terminals, ATMs, or any other access devices available in the market. The company performs its own in-country research and development, supports technology innovators that are attempting to enter the market, and provides strategic and implementation consulting on a global basis. Sevak Solutions is interested in promoting a set of technologies and migratory path for microfinance institutions and microfinance banks to expand their reach to the unbanked.
So here is a non-profit organization focused on developing open-source solutions in order to open access to the formal global financial system to anyone, anywhere, irrespective of their wealth. Bringing banking to the unbanked. Historically one of the great impediments to economic progress has been the lack of a cost-effective and robust financial infrastructure, Sevak seems to be taking direct aim at contributing significantly to solving this problem. I hope they succeed. Will they build the equivalent of Linux or WordPress for banking/transaction processing? I hope so, I will certainly try to follow their progress and they are definitely on my ‘find out more’ list.
As if it weren’t long enough already, another initiative that bounced on to my ‘find out more’ list earlier this year when I read about it in the Economist is TradeNet, a new mobile2mobile trading platform for farmers and traders in Africa founded by Mark Davies:
TradeNet, a software company based in Accra, Ghana, will unveil a simple sort of eBay for agricultural products across a dozen countries in west Africa. It lets buyers and sellers indicate what they are after and their contact information, which is sent to all relevant subscribers as an SMS text message in one of four languages. Interested parties can then reach others directly to do a deal.
Listing offers is free, as is receiving the texts. TradeNet plans to earn revenue by putting advertisements in the messages, though it hopes the service will become so useful that recipients will eventually want to pay. For the moment, though, the company is busy signing up users and swallowing the cost of sending the messages.
I have to admit this is one of those ‘I-wish-I-had-done-that’ companies. The potential for this kind of platform seem to me to be enormous. I’ll leave it at that for now. Very exciting stuff.
Why do I keep coming back to these subjects?
Banking over mobile phones in Africa. Very nice. We get it already.
Clearly this is a fascinating a very important development for what it is. But my interest goes beyond the obvious or first degree impact or consequences. My interest is stoked by the belief that this trinity may be the nexus of a new way of experiencing financial services. For anyone. Everyone. Call it pervasive finance. Ubiquitous finance.
Why Africa? Well it’s not New York, NY…but if you make it here…can you make it anywhere??? What can one learn from doing business in Africa and other markets where most people are poor and physical and legal infrastructure is often lacking? If you can provide a service or a product in such a difficult environment, certainly one should be able to offer it anywhere? If you can provide a service or a product profitably at a price point that works for a sub-saharan farmer, certainly one should be able to be a price leader anywhere?
I have a suspicion that most businesses in developed countries continuously underestimate their customers, and indeed when their customers don’t respond to a product or service the default attitude is all too often that it must be due to some shortfall in the customer – their understanding, their purchasing power (or more pointedly lack thereof) rather than a problem in the product or the way it is presented or packaged. At the risk of over-generalizing, I think most people in most places are smarter than businesses give them credit for. They may not be able to clearly articulate what they need or want all the time, but they know what outcome they want most of the time. Give them the means to acheive these outcomes and they will respond. And they don’t need to know, and often really don’t care to know how you do it – it is the result that matters. Financial services (albeit in no way unique) are particularly prone to this somewhat patronizing approach to their customers. To successfully do business in Africa implicitly one has to have faith in the potential customers.
(from The Economist) Companies are being started and successfully built in many African countries, especially in banking, retailing and mobile telephones. The region’s economy is growing steadily (see chart 1) and could expand by 5.8% this year. In part this is because of a commodities boom and debt forgiveness. But more peace, political stability and better economic management have done their bit, too.
…When Celtel, a mobile-phone operator, set up in Zambia eight years ago, it concentrated on the densely populated corridor between Victoria Falls (on the border with Zimbabwe), Lusaka and the industrial copper belt. This was thought to be the only area in which to do business. Yet in 2003, the company decided to invest in rural services, too, and was astonished at the result.
Although most rural customers had never used a telephone, they were keen to have one. This encouraged more people in the cities to obtain mobile phones to talk to relatives in the countryside. The introduction of Me2U, a service that allows callers to use text-messaging to send airtime credit to other mobiles, provided a further boost. Most people do not have bank accounts and the service has become a convenient and cheap way to transfer money. In villages it has also emerged as a substitute for cash, with people using airtime to pay for their shopping. Shopkeepers cash in their accumulated phone credits with people who make money by offering callers use of their mobile phones as a sort of public phone. Within the past two years, Celtel’s Zambian customers have grown from 70,000 to over 1m.
Celtel found that it succeeded if it adapted products and services to local tastes, needs and small budgets…
Although many Africans are poor, they are willing to pay for what they need. (my emphasis)
Adapting to local conditions and habits is critical to success – the humility not to assume what works elsewhere will work everywhere. This kind of open-mindedness can breed success even in the face of scepticism as to your customers’ ability to understand your product:
In Ghana Barclays, a British bank, started working with “Susu collectors”, who gather savings daily from informal traders without access to banking, to keep their money safe. There are an estimated 5,000 Susu collectors in the country, each working with an average of 400 clients. This is a $140m market that exists below the traditional banking radar. Barclays now offers special bank accounts, training and lending to the Susu collectors, who can provide credit to their clients. The bank was taken aback by the amount of money, sophistication and willingness to save in the informal economy.
The keys to success in Africa are not fundamentally different than the keys to success in the developed world; the difference is that if you get any of them wrong in Africa, you don’t survive. In developed countries however you can often get away with getting many things wrong and still muddle through given a much more forgiving and less challenging business environment. What’s the point? That perhaps there is a lot to learn from businesses operating successfully in Africa.
Another interesting angle when looking at doing business in Africa or other developing regions, is to consider the effects of technological “leapfrogging”. Again the Economist does a good job summarizing:
The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that it is wrong to assume that developing countries will follow the same technological course as developed nations. Having skipped fixed-line telephones, some parts of the world may well skip desktop computers in favour of portable devices, for example. Entire economies may even leapfrog from agriculture straight to high-tech industries. That is what happened in Israel, which went from citrus farming to microchips; India, similarly, is doing its best to jump straight to a high-tech service economy. Rwanda even hopes to turn itself into an African tech hub.
Those who anticipate and facilitate leapfrogging can prosper as a result. Those who fail to see it coming risk being jumped over. Kodak, for example, hit by the sudden rise of digital cameras in the developed world, wrongly assumed that it would still be able to sell old-fashioned film and film cameras in China instead. But the emerging Chinese middle classes leapfrogged straight to digital cameras—and even those are now outnumbered by camera-phones.
It seems clear that mobile phones (as opposed to personal computers) will be the most important device for access and connectivity in the developing world, and probably everywhere eventually. But access to the internet and computing will become more and more common everywhere, with many different initiatives – both technological and financial – focused on bringing down the cost and expanding the market for computing in the developing world.
As has been written many many times before, mobile phones are changing everything. From politics to business to culture. The digital generation is but a subset of the connected generation, a worldwide phenomenon. Again, this is probably being felt more strongly in developing countries – not so much because the effect is greater or different – but because the contrast with what came before is that much more marked. This extension of connectedness enabled by mobile telephony taps into something that is inate in humans; it extends our ability to form communities unbounded by geographical or even political constraints.
(from The Economist) In short, the use of mobiles in protest and politics and even banking (see article) is evolving faster than governments’ efforts to control it. Academics also find the phenomenon baffling, though they are studying it hard. Four eggheads with links to California’s Annenberg School of Communication will publish next month a book based on a two-year study of mobile phones and society. Their punchy conclusion? “When the dominant institutions of society no longer have the monopoly of mass-communication networks, the dialectics between power and counter-power is, for better or worse, altered for ever.” True enough, though the average teenage texter might put it better: “whn u cn fon u r in chrge 4vr”.
Or to quote Stowe Boyd:
Once power migrates to the edge, the edglings are unlikely to give it back.
I will finish by highlighting the growth of mobile phone banking in South Africa. Once again making reference to a great article in the Economist, (I guess I should really have a link on this site to send them potential subscribers ) South Africa is a particularly interesting laboratory for considering and observing the nexus of finance and mobile telephony, with aspects of both developed and develping worlds existing in the business environment.
About half a million South Africans now use their mobile phones as a bank. Besides sending money to relatives and paying for goods, they can check balances, buy mobile airtime and settle utility bills. Traditional banks offer mobile banking as an added service to existing customers, most of whom are quite well off. But Wizzit, and to some extent First National Bank (FNB) and MTN Banking (a joint venture between Standard Bank and a mobile-phone network), are chasing another market: the 16m South Africans, over half of the adult population, with no bank account. Significantly, 30% of these people do have mobile phones. Wizzit hired and trained over 2,000 unemployed people, known as Wizzkids, to drum up business. It worked: eight out of ten Wizzit customers previously had no bank account and had never used an ATM.
…In most of Africa, meanwhile, only a fraction of people have bank accounts—but there is huge demand for cheap and convenient ways to send money and buy prepaid services such as airtime. Many Africans, having skipped landlines and jumped to mobiles, already use prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money.
They could now leap from a world of cash to cellular banking. In Kenya, a pilot scheme called M-Pesa is being used to disburse and pay micro-loans by phone. Meanwhile Celpay, which FNB bought last year from Celtel, a mobile-phone company, is offering platforms for banks and phone companies in Zambia and Congo.
This is all pretty interesting and exciting in its own right, but I get most intrigued and excited about the ability to extend this mobile financial platform to a converged set of financial products beyond payments and basic credit (loans and deposits.) With a foundation payments infrastructure built, the ability to offer trading, insurance and other risk management products to anyone, anywhere in the world doesn’t seem too daunting. Indeed developing markets may also see financial ‘leap-frogging’ as the lack of incumbents, inertia and regulatory capture leads to the adoption of truly modern and converged financial services.
Clearly I am not alone in my fascination for microfinance and financial services generally in the developing world. It’s importance was probably for too long underestimated, but with Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel peace prize for his role in promoting financial services for the poor, clearly this is no longer the case. But Grameen Bank (and phone) are just the beginning and I don’t think we’ll have to wait more than a few years before business models defined and refined to prosper in the harsh light of emerging markets are exported to the developing world. We are used to giving the lessons. Will we be better students than teachers?
This is why I’m so excited about going to TED Global in Tanzania next June. The theme is Africa: The Next Chapter. I’ll be taking notes.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=ae74bc79-35fd-419d-b0a7-dc571f4e52f4)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=4f94e4c5-4f25-4e25-89c7-b7360e6c3780)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=f1c5d083-4661-475f-a33a-7426d4da0a8a)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=eeeab338-4a70-4575-8d7b-a5ed7fb3f2dc)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=70132ae9-b8b3-4bce-ad18-1787449a246f)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=c77f2549-f591-4fa6-a56b-ac8c2d54a4e2)
