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<h2 class="clearfix contentGroup cgMedium"><font size="2">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 :-)). </font><font size="2">Enjoy<br>
</font></h2><h2 class="clearfix contentGroup cgMedium"><font size="2">ar</font><br></h2><h2 class="clearfix contentGroup cgMedium"><a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/david-rowans-blog" title="David Rowan's Blog - Technology Blog - Wired.co.uk" class="cgLabel cgDavidRowanSBlog"></a></h2>
<h1 class="entry-title">Want to become an internet billionaire? Move to Africa</h1>
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<div class="author">By <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/search/author/David+Rowan" title="View all articles by David Rowan" class="fn">David Rowan</a></div>
<div class="published"><abbr class="updated " title="Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:21:00 +00:00">04 November 11</abbr></div>
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<p><span class="name">David Rowan</span><br><span class="role">Editor of Wired magazine</span></p>
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<div class="commentCountBox commentCountBoxBig"><a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-11/04/get-rich-move-to-africa#CommentList" title="Jump to comments">Comments <span>18</span></a></div>
<p><em>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 <a href="https://subscribe.hearstmags.com/subscribe/splits/gq-uk/gq_mar11c">
here</a>.</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/features/you-are-being-gamed">
Zyngas</a>, eBays and <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/17/groupon-possible-ipo">
Groupons</a> for a huge untapped local market. You need only <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/features/switching-on/viewgallery#%21image-number=7">
look at the map of huge broadband fibreoptic cables</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/start/data-banking">
Monitise</a>, a clever text-messaging system called <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/19/transparency-and-philanthropy">
FrontlineSMS</a> -- and your own Digital Life columnist with his
trusty notebook.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>So where could you make your own tech-based millions? A few
obvious markets primed for explosive growth:</p>
<p><strong>Mobile money</strong><br>
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 <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/08/features/switching-on?page=all">
M-Pesa</a>, 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."</p>
<p><strong>E-commerce</strong><br>
You don't need a smartphone, let alone a PC, to shop online. The
American startup SlimTrader runs a service called <a href="http://mobiashara.com/">MoBiashara</a>, which lets African
consumers shop by mobile on basic cellphones. And there are half a
billion of those in Africa.</p>
<p><strong>Business directories</strong><br>
The British startup entrepreneur Stefan Magdalinski -- formerly of
UpMyStreet and <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/05/features/fail-study-richard-moross">
Moo.com</a> -- 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.</p>
<p><strong>Health</strong><br>
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.</p>
<p><strong>Leapfrog tech</strong><br>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>Why shouldn't you have a profitable role in that future?</p>
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