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The essential guide to Africa's technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation ecosystems. Since 2015, co-founders Andile Masuku and Musa Kalenga have convened the continent's most influential voices — from startup founders and investors to policymakers and tech leaders — delivering bold, pan-African insights with a global perspective. Whether you're building, investing, or leading in African tech, this is where the conversation happens.
My name is Russell Southwood. I run a consultancy and research company called Balancing Act, which I've run over twenty five years focused on Sub Saharan Africa looking at telecoms, Internet, and media. I'm also the author of a book Africa two point zero, Insider Continence Communications Revolution, which looks at that twenty five year history of digital, all things digital, and communications in Sub Saharan Africa.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the African Tech Roundup, Russell.
Speaker 1:It's good to be here.
Speaker 2:Treated to have you on. I know you've done some writing for us at least once before, and so some of our audience will be familiar with your insights. Many of them will have read your book or interacted with you in person at numerous conferences you've spoken and moderated at over the years. Certainly many of them will know you personally in your work as a consultant. Thinking back to your first day in being part of what we now consider or take for granted as being Africa's tech ecosystem.
Speaker 2:What stands out to you as the most significant change? Think of that very first day where there was, like, your first consulting opportunity, your first visit to the continent, your first boardroom dive, you know, take me back.
Speaker 1:I think what was interesting was I was I read an article in by John Perry Barlow in Wired magazine, which was in 2000, and he had made a sort of similar trip to the continent. And John Perry Barlow was the lyricist with the Grateful Dead and was a member of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and came to Africa looking at the potential of the Internet. And some part of what he said was crazy, but some other part was also very interesting because it was about jumping kind of industrial revolution and focusing on what the new economy was going to do, and he had some idea of a the idea of a new economy. And in those days, when we came to Africa, there was, almost nobody involved in the Internet. The numbers of people interested in the Internet were in the hundreds or the thousands.
Speaker 1:And as I got more and more involved in it, there were lots and lots of people around who were enthusiastic, who saw the Internet as, if you like, the key to opening up potential. You have to think back to how what a depressing place Africa was in the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties. You were talking about in yeah. I I always remember the man who used to rule Togo was ruling Togo when I was in my teens at school and was still ruling Togo all those decades later, and his son now rules Togo. So that was the kind of stasis.
Speaker 1:And, also, he had things like apartheid and the frontline states and the damage that did to the economies of many of the countries of Africa. So that it was like nothing was happening. Africa was always victim. Nothing there was no agency. There was no sense of the continent doing something for itself.
Speaker 1:It was always being done to. And it seemed to me that digital and I was not alone in this. There were other enthusiasts around, and people like Ethan Zuckerman and Mark Davis from Busy Internet and people like that, all of whom thought this is the magic source. What I realized actually quite quickly was that there wasn't really effective Internet to be doing these sorts of things. So I think you had to do one of two things.
Speaker 1:You either had to get effective Internet into place or you did it with text messages on a mobile phone. And some people went down that route, and that was perfectly legitimate. But it did seem to me that all of the barriers that were preventing Africa from getting the Internet had to be dealt with. So I I certainly, in my personal journey, it was something like an eight year going around the bottom of the mountain journey simply to get to the start of the track. And in that journey, what we did was we looked at the liberalization of markets.
Speaker 1:We looked at how to break the monopoly of international cables. We looked at how the financing of international cables could produce the kind of underlying economies of scale that would allow an African Internet to develop. And that was eight to ten years. And that, as I say, that really just took you to the start of the track, was about 2008, 2009.
Speaker 2:So what were you doing though for someone who has no sense of the kind of work that would have brought you to Africa in the first place, nurtured an interest in these things to begin with? Maybe there's a hint in you attending the University of London SOAS, or is it SOAS University of London? I can't remember how you say it. I think that university seems to breed your sorts. But no, what would you point to as your interest in Africa as a place to explore these themes and, I suppose, launch a career?
Speaker 1:I came, I suppose, from the left of the political spectrum, and I was beginning to develop arguments with people who were in development about what development was about and arguments about the need to focus on creating wealth. So in other words, a lot of the arguments in development had been about who got wealth, and particularly a lot of the Marxist arguments of the nineteen seventies were about taking wealth away from people. Whereas it seemed to me that Africa needed more capitalism rather than less, and it was going to its sector, the state that would develop this kind of industry. Because if you remember back to the telecoms incumbents of Africa in the in the early two thousands, you would apply by form for a phone line, and it would take three months, you had to submit enormous amounts of paperwork and so on and so forth. I suppose one of the biggest early changes was that you walked into a shop selling mobile phones, walked out with the phone, and that was very difficult approach.
Speaker 2:This is quite something framing that as an innovation.
Speaker 1:No. Absolutely. But, I mean, it was because the state was a form of patronage. The people who got the phones more easily were civil servants, were the families of people associated with politicians. You know, a small class of people got access to this very vital form of communication, and that was all upended by mobile.
Speaker 1:It might only have been voice, but, actually, it was all upended by capitalism providing it in a particular way and in a way that was also competitive that drove down prices and all those kinds of arguments. I might make a very different set of arguments now, but actually, that was the beginning of it. And it does seem to me, if I think back when I started doing the newsletter that I did, which was distributed by email, I can remember a terrible moment at a conference somewhere in, I think, was South Africa, trying to send the email with the newsletter on a dial up connection. And hours passed, and it still wasn't going. And now if you go to most African cities, you've got an Internet that works.
Speaker 2:You know? It might even rival certain parts of Europe.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And the power goes down, and there's a whole number of x factors that are perhaps not quite as imposing as they are in places like London or Sheffield. But, actually, the Internet now does work, which raises then a whole set of different issues because it does seem to me that the thing about Africa is that Africa is the same as anywhere else. A recent announcement by MTN is that they're going to be doing fibers with a home in one of their big territories, exactly the same as Europe. You get around to it.
Speaker 1:You put the height of the home in.
Speaker 2:Sounds like a press release you might get.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Any kind of country in Europe or America or whatever. But, actually, Africa's different, and it's that constant race between those two different things or trying to hold those two different things in your mind that makes it such an interesting place.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what makes you an interesting conversationalist among other things is your firsthand experience and perspectives on two fronts, which are of great interest to me as the sort of editorial lead of African Tech Roundup, which is the imagined digital economy, which in many people's minds, warps anything real or tangible any of us could interact with every day in a way that's truly unimaginary for the most part. Or sometimes naively at worst, really just a projection for a future we all hope for. But there's something real to that notion, this idea of a digital economy. But then there's the real economy where all the stuff that makes sure that that leads to us living the lives of everyday Africans for those of us still on the continent or anywhere else in the world frankly, and still interacting meaningfully with the continent.
Speaker 2:Things we take for granted like ensuring, you know, the plantain we like to eat from, the store we like to buy it from is available. Or to your point, the phone call we wanna make when we're on our way home can be done or the WhatsApp exchanges that lead to perhaps the sale of a goat that we've been fattening for a celebration. Yeah. I'm digging in my own experience as an African. These are things quite literally that have have been part of my my life as an African living partly abroad for the last three months.
Speaker 2:And I think there are things that exist in what I call the real economy, not just I, but quite a lot of people. And then there's these two economies intersecting. And so you've had fairly colorful career in what I'd consider both of those segments. And then I think we've bonded perhaps most meaningfully at your observations at the intersection of this this imaginary that is slowly becoming real to some degree or to varying degrees depending who you speak to. And this real economy we're all a part of, but tends to sort take for granted because it's always been there or almost uncool to talk about because, I mean, who needs to talk about, like, roads and hospitals and things Yeah.
Speaker 2:When they're wizzy of things to talk about, like, AI and crypto.
Speaker 1:It always struck me that a big discussion got going about DRC, about putting in a fiber network with DRC and connecting it to a surrounding country. And if those plans were in place, then there would be more fiber by kilometer in DRC than there was actually roads. And it struck me that there's some dissonance here. Now, you know, the World Bank has various projects to build roads with fiber alongside and so on and so forth. So it's not something that I alone have noticed, but it does seem to me that there are other things in particular.
Speaker 1:I put my finger on two things, one of which is access to electricity because none of the digital good stuff comes without electricity. And the other one I would put my finger on is literacy. I had an interchange with a young African tech guy, and I was saying, actually, it's quite important that you can write on the device you have. And he was saying, no. I've got my mobile phone.
Speaker 1:I don't no need to write, you know, etcetera, etcetera. Not actually true.
Speaker 2:Not quite. Maybe that argument holds for people who think voice is gonna take over and now, you know, people can express themselves without ever needing to learn to read or write because, you know, they could just take things. But even then, there's the literacy aspects of knowing how to speak or assuming again that everyone's gonna be able to have a device that can translate them into a language of commerce as and when they need it without friction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you've touched on languages. Africa's great with languages, but actually, what do you do when a country has three different languages? How are you addressing people? It's you can say, oh, we won't address them in the colonial language, but then, actually, the kind of Rwanda is a good example.
Speaker 1:English and French, neither of them really. Kenya Rwanda, yes, but it that only deals with another proportion. So there's all those kind of
Speaker 2:How about 11 in South Africa? 11 Yeah. 11.
Speaker 1:And it's to some extent, it's it is the Tower Of Babel. And the difficulty is if you don't have literacy, then it's very difficult to develop certain things in a society because, actually, in order to program, in order to do a whole series of things and literacy is a set of layers. Literacy is can I read and write, and people are a bit nervous about saying it as straightforwardly as that? There's functional literacy, which is, can I read an airline timetable, or can I read a bus timetable, or can I read a menu? And then there's tech literacy, you know, is fairly obvious.
Speaker 1:What people don't understand is in Europe, I had ten, fifteen years of computers and laptops before I got to mobile phones. So I had a ten, fifteen year education. I could tell you what an operating system was. I could tell you what software was because of that ten, fifteen year day to day experience of using it. But if you've only ever used a mobile phone, a consultancy did a piece of work in Kenya and worked out that for a smartphone, there were 50 things that you needed to know in order to use the smartphone properly.
Speaker 1:So that is tech literacy. You have a lot in Africa of what I would call quite shallow use of mobile phones that leads you to define the territory you're looking at rather differently from what happens in Europe or what happens in America.
Speaker 2:As you're speaking, I just realized there's the question of an acquired discernment that even in the context of what you've just described from a literacy perspective, is actually knowing what's from a range of options, assuming all of them good, which ones are preferable and why, and having a sense of agency to actually pick and choose what suits you best in the context of say someone who's interacting with a fintech product for the first time that's giving them credit for the first time, as an example, via this mobile phone you just described, like or an insurance product and and and knowing what Yeah. What they're really in for or what it's about to cost them in the short, medium, or long term, both in terms of upside or potential downside. And there's the other thing linked to this that what you were saying also stands out in terms of like how much traction you and your personal capacity had in terms of adoption of these technologies before you started to interact or even start to think about how Africa might x y z and leveraging them to economic success of any kind. 2000 you mentioned. So I finished my o levels with GCSEs in 2001.
Speaker 2:I was part of the first wave of students at my school, was a private Christian school, which is one of the more privileged schools certainly in the general Kwairo area. But you know, I definitely had a privilege sort of high school, boarding school situation. I was part of the first wave in 2000 who took computer science or computer studies as it were called as an o level subject, which ended up being my lowest passer in high school or barely passed.
Speaker 1:But Full disclosure.
Speaker 2:Full disclosure. I never tried to get a job off the back of that result by the way. So I don't mind putting it out there. But here's the point. I'd consider myself of my generation, born '84, post independent Zimbabwe, one of the more privileged young black people of my generation.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? And so it's quite stunning to think that by the time you were interacting with Africa for the first time in 2000, you had what, nearly a decade plus
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of me. Yeah. No. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Terms of your your your active use and grasp, and not just grasp, your actual harnessing of these technologies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. And I couldn't have done the newsletter I did without the technologies being in place. Because if you can imagine trying to distribute something using fax or sending it by post in, you know, Sub Saharan Africa, it would So never it something did change. And so I think one of the difficult things is optimism and pessimism and trying to kind of constantly be sufficiently critical but sufficiently enthusiastic to say what's real, what's going on here, whereas at the same time, giving everybody a chance to be able to do the best they can, to promote and do the best they can.
Speaker 2:Without being paternalistic or condescending.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And I came to the continent. I had no sense that I wanted to come to the continent and, air quotes, save it. That that wasn't what I was here for.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Russell. We really appreciate
Speaker 1:it. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Thanks for coming.
Speaker 1:Take take a pass on But that I was interested in getting to grips with what the reality of something was that allowed then people to themselves understand that so that they could make their own future.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So in other words, my role was a passing one. You know? It was.
Speaker 2:So then let's go back because there's part of you that's journalist. There's part of you that's consultant. You're obviously author. You have these things. And I'm wondering in what order was your sort of exploration, your interest in Africa as a proposition nurtured?
Speaker 2:Like, did you see it as some do as this irresistible economic opportunity, last frontier, quote unquote, opportunity to do some of the the the greatest sort of capitalist enterprise of your life? Or did you see it as an open set of questions that you desire to sort of answer journalistically, systematically to serve certain ends? Were you just interested in researching this? Had you landed interest from a client base that had some or all of these interests and you could serve into it? Like, what was the deal?
Speaker 1:I came in 2000 and went to Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Uganda. When I landed, I had almost no contacts. So I would take out the yellow pages and look up Internet service providers and designers because I was kind of interested in design and thought, you know, that might be interesting. And there were almost none of them, and you could turn up, and I could say, I'm from London. I'm I'm interested in the Internet in Africa.
Speaker 2:I'm a journalist. I've got this newsletter. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. Exactly. Exactly. But at that that I made that I would share this because in a sense, what I was doing was I was studying the subject that I wanted to know about. So I shared this information.
Speaker 1:Of course, you don't share all information, but you share large parts of what you had, and it was weekly. So it was quite a lot of information being shared. And through that, I began to understand kinda what the issues were, but it was very instinctive. And I understood very early on that monopolies and state patronage were obstacles to getting stuff done, and to some degree still are.
Speaker 2:But So hang on. Hang on. So and and I wanna get it to that whole, like, what you what you found because I think it's fascinating. But your intent in sharing to start with as a ritual. So there was this ritual journalistic process of, I suppose, processing what you're learning from these observations of what you're doing.
Speaker 2:And then there's a decision on your part to publish it in a way that wasn't, I suppose, common in February. And certainly open sourcing information that to my mind would have constituted fairly helpful at very least, you know, turnkey information about these new markets in a way that hadn't been presented before that would have been locked into local mines and and people that experienced it by living there. I just wonder what internal conversation is going on to, like, motivate that set of response to all this.
Speaker 1:It's partly an understanding that if it was good enough, people would come to it. So it would create a village, and that's what it was. It was a village of people who are interested in things digital in Africa. And secondly, that in doing that, it was a form of intent. It was a way of saying, we now need to define the issues.
Speaker 1:Every week as I sat down, I had to say, is important? What isn't important. I didn't get it right every week.
Speaker 2:So gender setting of sorts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. You have to think, you know, kind of, okay. Well, why is this in here? Why is that in there?
Speaker 1:And that, particularly when it came to policy, became very quickly apparent that certain things, you know, because people would talk to me and and would explain, you know, this is why x won't happen. So very quickly, we get to the point of saying certain kinds of monopolies are actually preventing the price of Internet coming down, and that was the first big understanding. And it took me to looking at the international cable that came to Africa that the South Africans built called SAT three, which was going to be a monopoly, indeed was a monopoly, of all the telecoms operators that connected along the coast. And we began by saying, well, why is it a monopoly? Can we see the contract?
Speaker 1:Oh, no. You can't see the contract because it's, you know, it's commercially sensitive, etcetera, etcetera. And eventually, somebody sent us a copy of the contract. And, of course, in there, it says, should this need to be circulated? There's no problem with doing that.
Speaker 1:So you can see, it was quite difficult. And I remember having a conversation with somebody in Telkom, and and it was literally one of those conversations which almost sort of the only thing he would say to me was sort of name, rank, and serial number and wouldn't have a conversation with me.
Speaker 2:This is Telkom South Africa. So this is South Africa's fixed line monopoly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He's incumbent.
Speaker 2:Well, at the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Incumbent at the time. So those kinds of difficulties. And those kinds of difficulties haven't completely gone away.
Speaker 2:Which I suppose is now speaking to that observation you're making. That also partially answers the first question I asked, which is what have you seen change most significantly? You're saying one of the things you haven't seen change as as much as maybe you'd like is the fact that these are still matters, I suppose, intermediated by very powerful special interest, not least governments and I suppose their designated partners?
Speaker 1:Yes. What you see is a form of government in which many of the decisions go up to the president or almost to that level and are taken by a very small number of people. So you don't have the ability to spread power across a group of people. That that's different in different countries. But if you take somewhere like, I don't know, Cameroon, which is run by a 92 year old who's about to stand for election again, you're gonna get a very different result than you get for all its faults in Kenya or Nigeria, where there's much more of pushing and shoving an argument and different sources of power and different power bases and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:So it's to do with breaking that.
Speaker 2:So someone listening who says, but how different is that to the dynamics in, say, London where you live or any number of EU nations, which do appear to be fairly tightly controlled by a professional class of politicians, regulators, and policymakers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't think, though, you could have lived, you know, speaking for my own country, The UK. I think you could have lived through the past decade, decade and a half without all that not having been challenged. I might not like populist politics, but it has challenged all those previous assumptions of a comfortable elite. I might not like what Trump says, but it is the same thing.
Speaker 1:It challenges all of that comfortable elite to be accountable, to do and say things clearly in a public sense. And I think too, the creation of more or less independent regulators in the industry created a separate power place as it were, created a separate body which had, in some countries, the ability to actually, with all the kind of political nods in the direction of the president or whatever, make independent decisions and quite often did make independent decisions. And that is what created the long road to liberalization.
Speaker 2:As it happens, I'm reading off your AI generated bio here, Russell, which reminds me that you specialize in telecommunications, Internet media broadcasting across Sub Saharan Africa. And so I wonder if you've always seen those things as interrelated as part of one broader theme in light of what we're discussing now.
Speaker 1:No. I was always interested in content in a broad sense. If you take content and services, actually, I always used to say that the Internet is a big BIRO. And actually
Speaker 2:Meaning what exactly? What's a BIRO?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Something to write with. It's something you can express yourself with. It's something you can say things with, and it just becomes much more effective the more people are involved in it.
Speaker 1:Now some of what has happened with social media makes that look as not effective as it might have been. Some of the things that are happening with AI makes you go, oh, do you know, kind of.
Speaker 2:Aren't you a fan of everything wrestle come on? Isn't it all gravy? Don't you just love it? Don't you just
Speaker 1:love everything? Onwards and upwards. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe not.
Speaker 1:No. But what I'm saying is that as techno optimists, we were not good enough on saying that there were going to be things that simply reflected the cultures within which they operated, whether it was SMS messages or social media being used for fights between two ethnic groups or whether it was all sorts of unpleasant things happening in the political sphere.
Speaker 2:Facebook being leveraged,
Speaker 1:to Yeah. To harass women, to, you know, to scam people or Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Sex elections. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of that.
Speaker 2:So the whole techno optimist thing, I find it humorous, sometimes disheartening how unwilling we are to contend with the reality of the human condition. Now, I think a lot of people philosophically will differ with me in terms of my wholehearted belief that we are dysfunctional beings. And to your point, a lot of our use of some of the most celebrated technologies of our time tends to just awkwardly reflect dysfunctions that perhaps would otherwise have gone unnoticed or perhaps not as severely amplified. And so differ with me on that if you will. But here's the thing, I think we are many of us driven to two binary extremes unhelpfully, and perhaps to tap your nuance in thinking about Africa's digital transformation trajectory as this open check, like the future's gonna be crazy amazing for all of us because, I don't know, because Internet, because telecommunications, because look at decentralization or democratization of media.
Speaker 2:Like, thank goodness someone like you started a newsletter and didn't wait around, you know, to for a publisher to to to give them a voice or, you know, broadcasting. Thank goodness that's like open source and we can all TikTok and you'll be famous. So I think there's a way to think about opportunity in that regard as just blank check optimistic, amazing, can't wait for the future, let's go get it. Or we can sit here again, as some people would criticize the first part of our conversation so far and think, you guys don't seem very sort of bullish on Africa and you seem to be pinpointing at all the things that aren't working and we don't need to be reminded just how far behind we are everything or just there's more to life than AI. Like, there's a sense in which there are people who say, yes, we do.
Speaker 2:If we don't, we'll never have roads or hospitals or, you know, dig up trenches and actually put real infrastructure down that makes a difference. Something something needs to be in the middle somehow, don't you think?
Speaker 1:No. Absolutely. I think what was really interesting about the mobile revolution and what it did was that it put up all those billboards with happy families communicating with mobile phones. And it, and of course the
Speaker 2:Just you wait till you get a thirty three ten, like your life
Speaker 1:No, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And at one level, was nonsensical, but on another level, it was also aspirational. So people could look at that and say, yes, the good life.
Speaker 1:I can get the good life. Yeah. And I remember having a a conversation in South Africa with one of the leading broadcasters where he was saying, when people see stuff on television, they say to themselves, those people have got those things. Why haven't I got those things? Not in a kind of horrible way, but actually, that's the good life.
Speaker 1:That's what I want. So it does seem to me that the digital imaginary, as we've described it, there is somewhere in that what tomorrow will look like. It's just one has to keep one's feet on the ground and not imagine that Africa is going to be somewhere where stuff is manufactured tomorrow or stuff where software is going to be written tomorrow that will be world changing, that actually that you know, if we've talked about a set of changes and they've taken quarter of a century and you were doing your information technology o level and, you know, kind of I had had ten to fifteen years. Actually, it may take fifteen, twenty years for all of this to occur. And for the economies, the real economies of Africa to change because there is in the book, and I don't suppose it's enormously different now, one of the entrepreneurs who did a job site was telling me that in Finland, there were 40,000 real jobs at any given point in a population of 5,000,000, whereas in Kenya, there were only 2,000 jobs in an a population of 40,000,000.
Speaker 1:So you can see that the economies have to make some distance, the real economies that we've been talking about, and I believe that will occur. The thing not to lose sight of is that from nothing, communications became a major part of the economy, second only after mineral extraction and and oil. It created something like 12,000 new jobs. It created a multinational cadre of Africans who had skills that they didn't have before. So it's not that nothing has happened.
Speaker 1:It's just trying to keep one's feet on the ground and saying, okay. What can be done now and what can be done in five years time? And those might be different things.
Speaker 2:That's a good way to put it. Then I wonder for you then, and I'm glad you brought up the book, which of course in case you missed it in Russell's intro, Africa two point o, Inside a Continence Communications Revolution. Excellent read. And so what stands out to you then as some of your favorite sort of inflection point, call it moments, anecdotes, if you will, acknowledging the tendency towards oversimplification. It's asking you this question so that you feel free to like point to them as your random favorite moments in time rather than things that you feel pressured to point to as pivotal to where things needed to go, where things are headed.
Speaker 2:And here, I'd like to tap into you as a journalist, as an agenda setter in your context as a new media publisher. They used to call us back in the day new media people. But also accounting for your pragmatic sense of the interests you were interacting with as far as being a consultant to the likes of the World Bank and other people. What stands out to you as some of those favorite turnkey anecdotes that you might wish people talked about more or remembered?
Speaker 1:I think it's why history is important. If you look at M Pesa, there were actually money transfer systems, SellTel. You know, guys from SellTel had gone from, you know, going to the airport in DRC had noticed these guys alongside the road with stacks of money, and, you know, they were transferring money on a kind of trust basis between cities because the banking system didn't work in DRC. Now there wasn't the level of trust available to make that work, and then along came M Pesa. And M Pesa is always seen as a kind of, Kenyan product, but, actually, it was partly Africans were already transferring time, bought time, you know, credits from one phone to another.
Speaker 1:And DIFID comes along and put some money in it. Somebody persuades DIFID. There's a whole series of people in there making that, and it it almost happens accidentally. And then it happens in Kenya, and absolutely everybody grips it. But it can't get out of Kenya because everybody has all the same problems of trust and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:So it takes an awfully long time and an understanding of the practical stuff that makes it then, if you like, may migrate. And it's still migrating, and it's still taking time, but actually a whole ecosystem for payment has been created that is real, that involves all sorts of people being able to get money from one place to another that used to travel by bus. And that speeds things up. It makes things happen much more quickly. Just another quick anecdote, which was every time I was in Africa in the back of a cab and you were saying to somebody, where are we going?
Speaker 1:They would ring either the company that ran the cab or they would ring a friend and say, where is this? Where is it near? So we would get to near where it was and we're in a big conversation about, is it this and is it that? And another ringing and on and on you went. And a real breakthrough again happened in Kenya where the guy said, oh, hang on a minute.
Speaker 1:I'm going to look at Google Maps. And I pulled it out.
Speaker 2:Do you remember the first time that happened? Or Yeah. I can
Speaker 1:very clearly because I thought, jeez. And it's about behavior change. It's about people saying, I'm going to do something in a different way. And the problem with entrepreneurs, with people like ourselves who are analysts, who who look at it, we think, well, this is obvious. It's kind of logical.
Speaker 1:It's you know, why wouldn't you do it that way? Because it's so much quicker. But actually, it doesn't always work that way. People have particular behaviors. Sometimes for the people who have no money, those particular logical behaviors require money so they don't occur and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:And the success of M Pesa, which is a lesson that I I can't give over and over again too much, is that the middle classes and the people with money used in Pesa, people without money used in Pesa, and there was an interrelationship between those two sets of people. You know, if somebody wanted to pay So
Speaker 2:like that real that digital economy and read economy
Speaker 1:situation Exactly. They were married together. You know, if you wanted to pay your gardener or your maid or your driver, this is how it happened. So the driver knew this was the quickest way, you didn't have to wait and say, you know, boss, you know, you haven't paid me yet. It happened and it happened there and then and it was very, very different.
Speaker 1:And another weird anecdote. I used to I used to sitting in a Kenyan ISP's office at a certain time of the month, and a series of people came in bearing envelopes full of money paying their bills. This was how bill paying was done, and it would take you an hour to get there and it would take you, you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So it's all of those things, and that makes me tremendously optimistic that once you get below the hype, once you get below the who's selling what to whom, and that's partly why I think, you know, a lot of startup stuff is very frustrating because actually everybody's selling to everybody. And, of course, everyone's assuming, like, a certain market size and a certain addressable market size, not accounting
Speaker 2:for certain dynamics or evolutions in adoption or or sort of consumer dynamics that you are describing.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And Africa too has this sort of problem of everything's slightly has to be oversold because the people who have the VC capital have raised in part from the DFI funders. And as a result, it has to reach women in villages. It has to reach you know? So there's a whole set of impacts.
Speaker 2:Entire generations out of poverty at the same time. Also Absolutely. Don't you know, Russell?
Speaker 1:As as unicorn sums of funding and returns.
Speaker 2:Africa is now. It's Africa now. It's Africa rising. It's All that. The future is Africa.
Speaker 2:It's all of it all all right now. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and it won't happen without my startup and this dick I'm pitching you right now.
Speaker 1:No. Absolutely. Absolutely. And some of those people who knew nothing now know something. And, you know, if you take something like Tai Lopez from PAGA, you know, kind of fantastic, you know, several decade journey creating a large scale business.
Speaker 1:And I am they get respect. You know, that's that I can see. Other people knew nothing, know something now, but not enough to make the business successful, and, you know, a lot of it goes. And, of course, people, I've had conversations with people in, you know, VCs and in development who say, oh, yeah. But there's going to be failures because that's you know, we're looking for the two and a half unicorns or whatever.
Speaker 1:But that kind of blurs what should be a much clearer and much more honest picture, a much more looking in the mirror and seeing it picture.
Speaker 2:So Russell, you've just leaned into a question I was gonna ask, but you've already started to answer, which was what do you think we're missing when we don't account for the history telling you just shared or the reflections on anecdotes like yours? I suppose M Pesa is at this point like the default response by major Afro optimists whenever M Pesa is raised is like, come on guys, we've got bigger things going right now. But there's some benefits picking apart the micro lessons, some of which you've touched on here. And I think a great play for us to wrap this up is leaning into something you've intimated, which is the early stage VC interest that has literally put on blast the big African opportunity vis a vis tech vis a vis how tech is going to drive the future and how that future starts now and getting in now early is the smartest thing apparently you can do, whether you're thinking about this from an impact perspective or a commercial perspective or a hybrid of both. And you touched on a very touchy and thorny subject, which is some of the special interests that are riding on these narratives.
Speaker 2:I think to be fair to a lot of them perhaps, well meaning, accounting for what we've so far seen technology lend itself to shaping futures. Not least this conversation we're having. Look at how I've technically caught up with where you were 2,000 in terms of us being on a call decades later as peers of sorts, notwithstanding the years you had on me in terms of becoming a publisher, journalist, you know, a component within digital and innovation. I think even this conversation and our professional association could make this point, right? Could be like, this is what technology can do.
Speaker 2:So accounting for that, however, we have to ask ourselves, and I have to ask you, what you make of the VC I suppose it's tempered now given, you know, VC winter the world is generally in. But certainly the VC bullishness that has shaped perception of what the opportunity is and therefore what investment or savvy investment or savvy entrepreneurship interest or savvy career building in the space should be for anyone who's either African or Africa interested or Africa focused as an investor as a you know, so I wonder how what you make of the last fifteen years accounting for your history and what you've observed, VC specifically.
Speaker 1:I think that the interesting people take the time to try and understand what is happening and don't rush to selling something. When I had the conversation with Tayo Viosu about PAGA, he was saying when he first launched it, what he wanted to do was create a payment system that he was comfortable with and dealt with his kind of needs and that there would be more people like him out there. But he realized quite early on that, actually, there were other people out there who had different kinds of needs and will require a system that was very different. And it's that we go back to the same thing, same as everywhere, different. And I think it's the the people who will take the long view, but also be realistic because, again, I had a conversation with a VC investor, I guess you would call in Nigeria, who was saying that, yeah, I've got x number of businesses and and three of them now are businesses which are not going anywhere, but the guys who are running it just don't realize that's the case.
Speaker 1:And so there is that thing of, am I succeeding at this? Is it breaking through? And the difficulty the difficulty always and I've, you know, I've listened and talked to lots and lots of African startups is the point at which you say, I'm going to go into another country. And those that have succeeded in going into another country, it seems to me, are making some way towards what the future is because it's sort of knitting the continent together. It's creating businesses that are transferable and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:So PAGA has gone off into Ethiopia. It didn't get to Mexico, which he was also talking about. But you have somebody like Twiga who have recently stopped delivering and are redefining the business and reworking it, and I I was an early enthusiast of Twigger, and and there were many good reasons for that. It seemed like it it met a need and so on and so forth. And I I I think, you know, for all sorts of reasons, we were wrong.
Speaker 1:Didn't get to be in Tanzania, didn't get out of one country. And, actually, startups won't, in the main, succeed in one country alone. Startups, if they are to be the transformative element of African business, need to be able to find and, you know, Africa has five to 10 countries which are the launch pad for something that will be pan continental businesses that will change what can be done and change how people do it in the next five to ten years.
Speaker 2:Notwithstanding valuations.
Speaker 1:No. Indeed. Indeed.
Speaker 2:And wasn't Twigger like one of the most bankable, you know, VC bets of its of its generation when it you know, in the first five odd years of its existence? And by the way, that says nothing about how well attempted, not that I know everything there is to know about that business, but having interviewed and spoken to members of that team early on, I don't think you were foolish or naive to think they were onto something. However, I think part of what I'm hearing you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, is there's an opportunity now for us to mature our sense of how we frame what good looks like, some of the more binary sensibilities of is this a winner, is this not, some of the oversimplifications about what truly constitutes investability. I think the conflation of sometimes well meaning attempts to build ecosystem capacity. Even the Internet had to have the US government's proper army dollars to its you know, to to to building that out as an infrastructure.
Speaker 2:So I think there's a way to acknowledge that certain things need to exist for their sake before there's an economic case for them. But the question for me is often forcing dishonestly or unhelpfully the idea of these matters as an economic case with immediate commercial returns linked to them actually turns our ecosystem into a place where people's dreams come to die or disappointments are groomed unnecessarily. And and then we all come across like we've been selling, you know, fake dreams about a future that is is either not gonna happen or not at all foundationally possible.
Speaker 1:But I think also too, one of the things that I've said, and I think is probably still true, is that the digitalization of government, the digitalization of existing businesses begins to change certain things, and some of that has happened. You know, some ministries, you know, when I started, you know, the you go to the Ministry of Education in one country, and, the computer was used for the guys to put his jacket on. And now people are using those computers. You you wouldn't think of not having them. You etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1:So that process of, you know, the long march through multinational companies, local large enterprises, etcetera, etcetera, taking in digital is part of this process of the deepening of the process of the promise. You know, the promise starts there in a way and the skills because the skills that are required, the number of people who know anything about large language models in Sub Saharan Africa, is probably vanishingly small. And I'm I'm happy if people start throwing rocks at me and saying, yes. Actually, we all know about it. But it's kind of
Speaker 2:Let's say this, Russell. If you're one of those people, give us a shout. I'd love to hear about what you're doing. Maybe have you on the podcast here.
Speaker 1:That would be good.
Speaker 2:Genuinely speaking, we're all a part of the history you describe in your book. Some of us later to the party admittedly than others. But we I think we all have something to say, particularly those of us who have the privilege of shaping those futures in practical ways embedded in in the corporates or the governments or the regulators or the the DFIs we've been referencing on this call. It'd be amazing to hear from anybody listening to this podcast reflecting in practical, anecdotal, and maybe actionable insight terms what they're learning from their experience. And so to that end, hit us up via email.
Speaker 2:It's andile@africantechroundup.com. If you wanna reach out to me directly. Otherwise, it's African Tech Roundup on LinkedIn and africanroundup on x. Yeah. Please, by all means, DM us, let us know what's happening.
Speaker 2:And Russell, I want to thank you, but not before I ask you one final question, particularly about this book because I presume since writing it, you've received some interesting feedback. What would you say is your top reaction, unexpected or otherwise, pushback after you drop the book?
Speaker 1:I think the toughest thing was reaching conclusions because it's a story that will run for decades, and actually saying something meaningful at this point is very hard. So I think, you know, there are various people who said things about the conclusions, which I think are absolutely right, which is they seem very tentative. They seem very provisional. But I think that's how it is. You know?
Speaker 1:Africa's busy being made, and certain parts of Africa hopefully are busy dying, but, you know, kind of in that process comes a very different future.
Speaker 2:I quite appreciate the bad tone in the book, which in my thinking, the difference between observation and value judgment. And I think we're in a culture which typically conflates the two all the time or leaps to value judgment without clear observation or even just reflecting agnostically on observation. I felt like your book did that for me in a way that I found refreshing. I think you obviously have lots of minefields to walk as being an outsider trying to tell the story from your purview, and I think you you handled that very nicely. But to whoever gave you that feedback, I'd say, again, I agree maybe agree with you in saying you certainly didn't impose an Oxford or Cambridge level thought leadership stake in the ground, therefore, this than the other, which can be annoying by the way, the sub authors.
Speaker 2:But I also do appreciate that it does leave it up to us to be part of how this pans out, and I hope this conversation adds to that end meaningfully. So with thanks from the village, Russell Southwood, thank you so much for being on the African Tech Roundup.
Speaker 1:Good to talk to you.