As the excellent book by the Guinean economist Carlos Lopes says (Africa in Transformation: Economic Development in the Age of Doubt), the African continent is being transformed by three major trends: climate change, demography and technology.
The first brings enormous challenges and opportunities for migration to green energies, especially solar. The second represents a demographically young continent, with great vitality and creativity. The third concerns the connectivity that is real today and the expansion of the knowledge economy in Africa in general.
It is in this context that the Silicon Savannah (Silicon Savannah) is inserted, which is located in Kenya and has its epicenter in the capital, Nairobi. The city of Nairobi today is the sixth largest financial center on the continent. One of its features is innovation in banking, payments and fintechs. After all, Kenya is the country that invented M-Pesa.
It is one of the first ways to transfer money 100% digitally via cell phone. M-Pesa was created in 2007, when smartphones did not yet exist (the iPhone was only launched in June 2007).
In its first format, it only used SMS messaging technology to enable digital transfers. Today, 15 years later, M-Pesa has become a multinational present in several countries on the continent. Walking through African cities it is easy to find service stations and also billboards advertising the brand.
But the M-Pesa is just the spearhead of a much more complex ecosystem. Nairobi has attracted international capital and has been the subject of successful government policies to support innovation.
This is visible in the various incubators and collaborative workspaces. Among them the iHub, which has already launched more than 450 startups in the country. Or, the Nairobi Garage, a workspace with three different units in the capital, housing more than a hundred startups.
It was also in Nairobi that Ushahidi, a civic technological platform for promoting democracy and public participation, was born. The site was also created in 2007 after the serious conflicts that followed the presidential elections. As a cause, the distrust in relation to the electoral process.
It was in this context that Ushahidi created a platform for monitoring the elections that later became a space for mobilizing civil society. For example, during the Covid-19 crisis, the website was used to coordinate Kenya’s response to the pandemic. All its technology is open source, and has been used in different parts of the world, including Brazil.
Since 2007 there has been a lot of progress in this area. So much so that the last Kenyan presidential election, which ended last week and was highly polarized and contested, did not result in any significant violence despite the tension. At the moment Nairobi, the place where this article was written, is having a normal life.
As the great Carlos Lopes also says: “Countries are only successful when they have very few priorities”. It is in this context that Kenya has found its calling: prioritizing financial services as an engine for broader innovation. And it is in this area that Brazil finds itself totally lost. We have no plans, no direction, no priority when it comes to innovation.
It’s over – there is only one “silicon valley”
It’s coming – innovation hubs everywhere, such as São Pedro Valley in Belo Horizonte
It’s coming – innovation hubs on the African continent gaining prominence
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
