How Anywhere is reshaping African life

By Carl Howe, Director, Yankee Group Research

I got a rude awakening early this morning: the ice and snowstorm that blew through Massachusetts last night knocked out our power. That meant we had no lights, no heat, and no running water (darn those electric well pumps!).

But, like in Emerging Anywhere countries, even though we didn’t have power, we did have Internet access via our mobile phones. And that strange disparity-the ability to call people and access information from the rest of the world when we didn’t have basic infrastructure services-provided personal emphasis to stories I’d recently read in the news over the weekend.

The Boston Globe noted how mobile phones are changing Africa in its Ideas article, The End of the Office and the Future of Work. The lead paragraphs told of a Boston company I hadn’t even known about:

By the end of the month, a company called txteagle will be the largest employer in Kenya. The firm, started in its original form in 2008 by a young computer engineer named Nathan Eagle and, as of this coming June, based in Boston, will have 10,000 people working for it in Kenya. Txteagle does not rent office space for these workers, nor do the company’s officers interview them, or ever talk to most of them.

And, in a sense, the labor that the Kenyan workforce does hardly seems like work. The jobs - short stretches of speech to be transcribed or translated into a local dialect, search engine results to be checked, images to be labeled, short market research surveys to be completed - come in over a worker’s own cellphone and the worker responds either by speaking into the phone or texting back the answer. The workers can be anyone with a cellphone - a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed. The jobs take at most a few minutes and pay a few cents each (payment is sent by cellphone as well), but a dedicated worker can earn a few dollars a day in a part of the world where that is a significant sum.

The UK’s Guardian had an article from its Katine blog that noted other new business opportunities within Africa made possible by the rise of mobile phones:

While access to a fixed landline has remained static for a decade, access to a mobile phone in Africa has soared fivefold in the past five years. Here, in one of the poorest parts of the globe, nearly one in three people can make or receive a phone call. In Uganda, almost one in four has their own handset and far more can reach a “village phone”, an early and successful microfinance initiative supported by the Grameen foundation.

One recent piece of research revealed how phone sharing, and the facility for phone charging, has been an engine of this small-business revolution. Particularly in rural areas, a small investment in a phone can first create a business opportunity, then maximise its reach by overcoming the possible limitations of real or technological illiteracy - because the phone operator can make sure the call gets through, and can cut off the call at exactly the right moment to avoid wasting any part of a unit. And what a difference a phone call can make.

Now that our power is back on, I’m sure I’ll go back to just expecting lights, running water, and heat as a normal part of the environment. But nonetheless, these examples from Emerging countries are great reminders of how Anywhere is reshaping the parts of the world that we don’t read about every day. And of course, there are more examples and details in our recent book, Anywhere: How Global Connectivity Is Revolutionizing The Way We Do Business.