[AfrICANN-discuss] Want to become an internet billionaire? Move to Africa

[Anne-Rachel Inné]

 a lot of you may not have picked this one up from one of our daily
reviews... as it came back to me from someone outside of the region with
comments, I thought I should resend it to see if we all read :-)).  Enjoy
ar
<http://www.wired.co.uk/news/david-rowans-blog> Want to become an internet
billionaire? Move to Africa
By David Rowan <http://www.wired.co.uk/search/author/David+Rowan>
04 November 11

David Rowan
Editor of Wired magazine
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  Comments 18<http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-11/04/get-rich-move-to-africa#CommentList>

*I write The Digital Life, a monthly tech column in our sister CondéNast
magazine, GQ. This is my column from last month's issue (dated April). To
subscribe to GQ, click
here<https://subscribe.hearstmags.com/subscribe/splits/gq-uk/gq_mar11c>
.*

If you want to become extremely wealthy over the next five years, and you
have a basic grasp of technology, here's a no-brainer: move to Africa.

Seriously. The internet is only now arriving, and -- with a billion people
on the continent still mostly offline -- there exists a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to build the next
Zyngas<http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/features/you-are-being-gamed>,
eBays and Groupons<http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/17/groupon-possible-ipo>for
a huge untapped local market. You need only look
at the map of huge broadband fibreoptic
cables<http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/features/switching-on/viewgallery#%21image-number=7>currently
being laid on both east and west coasts, from Djibouti to Dakar,
to understand how quickly and ambitiously an entire continent is being
connected. It's like being back in 1995 again, and realising there might
just be a market for an online bookshop or auction website.

Don't take my word for it: David Cameron is so keen to give British
entrepreneurs a foothold that he recently took a high-level delegation of
corporate CEOs to Nigeria and South Africa to highlight "one of the
greatest economic opportunities on the planet". The trip -- featuring the
bosses of firms such as Barclays and Bombardier, Vodafone and Virgin
Atlantic -- was hailed by Downing Street as "a historic visit to a
continent with a trillion dollar economy and the potential, according to
the IMF, to grow faster than Brazil over the next five years". Much of that
growth will come from startups that bring the mobile internet to businesses
and consumers who have until now been offline. That's why Cameron's team
invited along the British founders of red-hot mobile-money business
Monitise<http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/start/data-banking>,
a clever text-messaging system called
FrontlineSMS<http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/19/transparency-and-philanthropy>--
and your own Digital Life columnist with his trusty notebook.

It was, admittedly, a surreal four-day schedule -- taking in South Sudan,
Rwanda, Nigeria and South Africa -- that, at the last moment, was squeezed
to just two days and two countries (well, there was the small matter of a
domestic phone-hacking crisis to distract the PM's attention). But that was
long enough to get a sense of the extraordinary opportunities -- at a time
when McKinsey and Ernst & Young are forecasting that $150 billion will flow
into Africa by 2015, and that consumer spending will reach $1.4 trillion by
2020. No wonder Helios Investment Partners could recently raise a $900
million fund specifically targeting the continent.

So where could you make your own tech-based millions? A few obvious markets
primed for explosive growth:

*Mobile money*
Who needs banks if you can use your mobile to send and receive cash? More
than a quarter of Kenya's GDP now passes through a phone-to-phone network
called M-Pesa<http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/features/switching-on?page=all>,
and in Uganda MTN MobileMoney has almost two million users. As Cameron put
it in a speech to Lagos Business School, "Today, mobile banking systems
mean we can cut out middlemen and make a direct impact on the lives of
small farmers who can produce more food, feed their families, sell more
food at the market and in turn buy more seed."

*E-commerce*
You don't need a smartphone, let alone a PC, to shop online. The American
startup SlimTrader runs a service called MoBiashara <http://mobiashara.com/>,
which lets African consumers shop by mobile on basic cellphones. And there
are half a billion of those in Africa.

*Business directories*
The British startup entrepreneur Stefan Magdalinski -- formerly of
UpMyStreet and Moo.com<http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/05/features/fail-study-richard-moross>--
moved to Cape Town a couple of years ago to run a bunch of firms for
international media group MIH, including a Kenyan business directory,
Mocality, that gave many companies their first online presence. Why?
Because he wanted to be where the action was.

*Health*
Not only do mobile phones turn into blood-pressure monitors and ultrasound
devices that can connect rural communities. They can also detect
counterfeit medicines: the startup mPedigree works with pharmaceutical
companies to let patients text codes on packs of antimalarials to receive
confirmation that they're genuine.

*Leapfrog tech*
If a tiny fraction of, say, Zimbabweans have access to the "big" internet,
then why not make the internet accessible via SMS on their 2G phones?
That's what Econet Wireless Zimbabwe is offering its five million mobile
phone subscribers, turning their handsets into virtual smartphones with
tech from ForgetMeNot Africa that turns emails and chats into text messages.

Now insert your own big idea here, and book your air ticket. Sure, Africa
still faces huge hurdles -- in South Africa, 11 million people live below
the poverty line, and almost 6 million have HIV; in Nigeria, 110 million
out of a population of 158 million live on less than £1 a day. But when one
telco alone, Bharti Airtel, recently announced $13 billion in African
revenue last year, you know it's time to abandon our traditional
assumptions.

As Cameron said in Lagos, "Which continent has six of the ten fastest
growing economies in the world?... Africa is transforming in a way no-one
thought possible 20 years ago…and suddenly a whole new future seems within
reach."

Why shouldn't you have a profitable role in that future?
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