Africa 2.0: Inside a continent’s communications revolution

By Russell Southwood

Africa wired up provides an important history of how two technologies – mobile calling and internet – were made available to millions of Sub-Saharan Africans and the impact they have had on their lives. The book deals with the political challenges of liberalization and privatization that needed to be in place to get these technologies built. It analyses how the mobile phone fundamentally changed communications in Sub-Saharan Africa and the ways Africans have made these technologies part of their lives. It examines critically the technologies’ impact on development practices and the key role development actors played in accelerating things like regulatory reform, fibre roll-out and mobile money. The book considers how corruption in the industry is a prism through which patronage relationships in Government can be understood. The arrival of a start-up ecosystem has the potential to break these relationships and offer a new wave of investment opportunities. The author seeks to go beyond the hype to make a provisional assessment of the kinds of changes that have happened over three decades. It examines how and why these technologies became transformative and seem to have opened out a very different future for Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526154804

Book preview

Africa 2.0

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Africa 2.0

Inside a continent's communications revolution

Russell Southwood

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Russell Southwood 2022

The right of Russell Southwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5481 1 hardback

ISBN 978 1 5261 5482 8 paperback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover design: Hollis Duncan

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction

Part I:Technology diffusion: the spread of mobile calling and internet

Prologue (1986–2004)

1 Mobile voice calling booms (1993–2004)

2 Bandwidth as the digital economy's fuel: getting sub-Saharan Africa connected (1991–2015)

3 Cheaper mobile internet and low-cost smartphones come together with apps sub-Saharan Africans want to use (2005–18)

Part II:Technology influences: uses, behaviours and abuses

4 Mobile money: from transferring cash by SMS to a digital payments ecosystem (2000–20)

5 Sub-Saharan Africans start to live the digital life (2000–20)

6 Sprinkling on the magic dust: digital's impact on development (1982–2020)

7 The ugly underbelly of the communications revolution: corruption, cronyism, regulation and government (1999–2020)

Part III:Taking the long view: start-up innovation and complex behaviour change

8 Sub-Saharan African start-ups: getting beyond the hype to address deep market challenges (1995–2020)

9 Doing complexity: making sense of what has happened over thirty-five years

Appendix A: Glossary

Appendix B: List of those interviewed

Select bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

Map

1 Sub-Saharan African countries and their fibre networks (Source: CC-BY 4.0 Attribution-only licence by Steve Song)

Figure

1 Uneven and incomplete implementation of regulatory reform (Source: Connecting Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank, 2004)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife, Sara Selwood, who is both my best friend and co-conspirator, and my daughter Rose Allen-Cleary (who was Balancing Act's first employee), and my two granddaughters, Betty and Moira. The future is female.

I should also like to acknowledge the work done by all my employees, including Anita Borvanker, Mapara Syed, Isabelle Gross, Selma Faria, Ilona Sagar, Ashia Khatoon, Sylvain Beletre, Matthew Dawes and, last but very much not least, Alice Saywood.

A special thanks to Sara Selwood and my friend Kelly Wong, who agreed to be my editors, and to the following people who went out of their way to spend time above and beyond the call of duty in answering my questions or providing help, including: Arjuna Costa, Tidjane Deme, Jonathan Donner, Laurent Elder, Bridget Fishleigh, Jessica Hope, Steve Huter, Matthew Kentridge, Charley Lewis, Andile Masuku, Andile Ngcaba, Judith O’Neill, Steve Song, Tim Unwin and Jason Whalley. Thanks also to Professor Richard Rathbone, who taught me African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

No list of acknowledgements would be complete without my profound gratitude to the staff of Guys and St Thomas’ radiotherapy departments for their kindness and professionalism and to my consultant, Dr Simon Hughes. In this case, ‘without whom this book would not have been written’ has a very direct and literal meaning.

I'd like also to remember some of the people who did not get to see all the things that have and haven't happened: Mark Bennett (on an operating table in Lusaka), Rick Beveridge, Matt Buckland (cancer), Marilyn Cade, Bev Clark (suicide), Bob Collymore (cancer), Astrid Dufborg (cancer), Carey Eaton (shot by robbers in Nairobi), Venancio Massingue, Teresa Peters (cancer), Miko Rwayatire (on an operating table in Brussels), Guido Sohne (causes unknown), Manny Texeira and Kai Wulff (plane crash). There were many others, but these friends and colleagues have stayed in my thoughts.

Thank you too, to the people of the many countries of Africa who have changed how I understand the world.

Abbreviations

Introduction

It's hard to believe that in 1986 sub-Saharan Africa – in a much-quoted phrase – had less phone lines than Manhattan and that it could take two years or more to get a fixed line in many African countries. By the end of 2019, 45% of Africans had a mobile phone and 25% had access to mobile internet.¹ This is the generation that skipped the use of geographically tied, fixed lines.

Africa 2.0 is about sub-Saharan Africa's communications revolution and the people who made it happen. It is a ‘first draft’ history that looks at the forces that drove and opposed these changes. It seeks to go beyond the hype, to understand what has happened in terms of mobile calling and the internet over three and a half decades. This is not a detailed book about telecoms and internet regulation, nor is it written to provide policy recommendations. It is about understanding what has happened since 1986.

Framework to understand technology change

This section outlines how the book deals with issues of technologies and change. Much of our understanding of these, particularly in the field of policy as it applies to sub-Saharan Africa, derives from thinking about ‘hardware’ – things that are easy to measure, such as the extent of fibre networks, the number of mobile and internet subscribers and how many jobs have been created. These are essential for generating and measuring change but are not necessarily manifestations of what has changed. In this rather inadequate analogy, it is the ‘software’ – the social interactions and behaviour – that are crucial to understanding what has happened. Parts of this book blend these things together. For example, Facebook and Google (see

Chapters 3 and

5) are both economic and business forces, but they produce knowledge, culture and trivia, as well as any number of unintended consequences.

Evaluations undertaken for the development sector often employ methodologies that involve versions of inputs, outputs and outcomes. The inputs indicate the assets applied to a project: for example, human and financial resources invested in a farmers’ information service which is accessible on a mobile phone. The outputs refer to what has happened: for example, the number of farmers who subscribed to the information service. The outcomes constitute the broader changes that the funding was intended to produce from the inputs and outputs. So, for example, the farmers changing their approach to growing more crops more efficiently.² In this framework, the outcomes are the intended change generated by the inputs and outputs.

This kind of instrumentalism is designed for practical purposes, as part of having goals to work to, accountability to comply with and learnings to be taken. But it suggests a rather narrow description of how people – in this instance Africans – live their lives. They have agency – things don't just happen to them. Adopting technologies only affects particular aspects of their lives and the choices they make, however circumscribed these might be. It has been suggested that ‘Appropriation is the process through which technology users go beyond mere adoption to make technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices.’ ³ This is usually something that happens over a period of years rather than months.

There is a difference between this lengthier and less obvious uptake of technologies and the simpler measurements of ‘hardware’ being available. Therefore, the book deploys multidisciplinary sources. Seams of ethnography and anthropology provide examples of the distance between narrow ‘outcomes’ and life as it is actually lived. This work focuses on the emotional connections between people, the social and cultural norms of family life and how these relate to the technologies under discussion.

Development agencies, with instrumentalist agendas, have looked for virtuous interactions, including gaining knowledge from using the internet. However, its early adopters in sub-Saharan Africa were not necessarily looking for the rational information benefits that were driving the early ideas of a ‘knowledge society’.⁴ They took the opportunity to reinvent their lives through making new friends, starting relationships and getting visas and education opportunities abroad. They wanted experiences beyond the ‘boredom’ of the everyday life they were living.

This confusion between rational benefits and everyday pleasures is also found in how rural users make use of the internet. Manzer's observation about the Indian context also rings true for sub-Saharan Africa:

Whenever we talk about rural … nobody thinks entertainment is more important, because we think … they should not watch a movie, they need food first, they need water first, and we do not realise that they are also humans. They do not have as many entertainment options as we have, and therefore they need to have this … Do you know what the most accessed services online [are] that we have found? Facebook, Google and news …

⁵

Technology is socially defined and not a separate entity from the social sphere. It may have ‘special powers’ but it will be users’ choice to use them or not. As Larkin observed: ‘The meanings attached to technologies, their technical functions and the social uses to which they are put are not an inevitable consequence but something worked out over time in the context of considerable cultural debate.’ ⁶ By definition, if technology is socially defined, the ways in which it is used in sub-Saharan African countries differ from how it is used elsewhere, and that difference is important. To understand that, ‘rather than starting with the internal essence of a technology and then attempting to deduce its effects from its technical specifications, one begins with an analysis of the interactional system in a particular context and then investigates how any particular technology is fitted into it’.⁷ In sub-Saharan Africa particular contexts vary considerably. Not everyone starts from the same place. An illiterate⁸ African has less, or no, chance of using SMS (Short Message Service) or the internet and a women in a traditional household has less chance of getting her hands on a phone than her male counterpart (see Chapters 5 and

9).

It is in the nature of this kind of book that it isolates out what has happened with mobile calling and internet technologies. But, as already implied, technologies develop alongside each other and not in isolation from older technologies. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, radio receivers in basic and feature phones are an important feature of mobiles but are rarely discussed.

⁹

The communications technologies that Africa 2.0 explores were not the first to be used in sub-Saharan Africa. The post-independence nationalist leaders deployed radio stations and television networks as part of their modernising agendas.¹⁰ But, arguably, the two technologies that are the subject of this book – mobile calling and internet – are in many ways very different from those that went before. They are not one-to-many technologies sending ‘messages’ one way; a person listening to a radio programme cannot respond directly to it using the radio. Mobile calling and internet are many-to-many technologies creating networks between people; multiple users can both contribute and receive information.

As already mentioned, these technologies are regarded by some commentators as possessing ‘special powers’. These might be said to include their ability to speed things up and close geographic divides. As with the nineteenth-century telegraphy revolution,¹¹ which contributed to the making of empires, both mobile calling and internet closed distances that would have been time-consuming and difficult to travel. In doing so, they speeded up social and economic transactions. A rural parent can ring a son or daughter in Lagos or London, and get money for an emergency the same day.

Barlow's article ‘Africa rising’ in Wired magazine¹² focused on the same central idea that this book enquires into: why did things happen the way they did? Writing at the beginning of the process, he offered a provisional cultural and anthropological answer:

Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, once defined information as ‘any difference that makes a difference.’ In an information economy, difference is everything. It's differences that draw out the voltage of wealth. Africa's strength is difference: thousands of different microcultures that developed out of the difficulty of travel between thousands of different terrains, languages, and climates.

Most Africans stayed out of the loop of the 20th century and were not homogenised into the generica that is now much of … what they call the North. And thus their continent – so intensely different from the rest of the world, so vastly different within itself – represents a huge and still unconnected battery of stored potential. All it would take for Africa to leapfrog into the wonderland of an information economy would be to attach the electrodes – get it wired, in other words – and then watch its huge voltage zap the gap. Or so went my theory.

¹³

However, unlike Barlow, this book identifies language differences as a key barrier contributing to the digital divide (see Chapter 5).

One important effect of mobile and internet technology is the ‘digital divide’, a term first used in 1995 by Lloyd Morrisett, the former president of the US-based Markle Foundation, to refer to information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.¹⁴ Spanish sociologist Castells’ definition of the digital divide was more specific, as ‘inequality of access to the internet’ ¹⁵ (later he focused more on inequality of mobile phone access) and as representing ‘Africa's technological apartheid at the dawn of the information age’, in particular.

¹⁶

But, even as the digital divide was identified, arguments over whether and how it could be closed began. It was argued that accelerating the take-up of communications technology devices would only widen it:¹⁷ in other words, using technology allows the rich person to do more and gain more advantages than the poor person

¹⁸ (see Chapters 5 and 9).

These technological changes were driven by a device that most sub-Saharan Africans could hold in the palm of their hand, one that was so useful to them that they checked it when they got up in the morning and left it by their bed when they went to sleep at night. The mobile was so well loved that a woman in Sierra Leone – who would have died of delivery complications had it not been for her phone – named her baby boy after her mobile provider. In Ghana, its image was printed on Kente fabric. This mobile device transformed the assumptions about what Africans could do, and it seems to have opened out a very different future for sub-Saharan Africa.

Methodology

Over two of the three and a half decades in which many of the things described in this book happened, I was an observer, a campaigner and directly involved in many of the events that took place. Sometimes I was in the centre of things, at other times I simply observed them. I started with all the clarity that comes from being an outsider and, over time, as I learnt more, I became some kind of insider.

In methodological terms, the book is based on twenty years of primary research. Every week when I edited and wrote Balancing Act's News Update, my weekly e-letter on telecoms and internet in Africa, which started in 2000, I had to interview someone and identify the important issues of the week. The book draws on the various e-letters I published over the period. They contain over 1,500 items – original interviews and articles – and my two YouTube channels contain another 1,300 interviews (see below, ‘How it all began’). In addition, I conducted academic and policy research with universities, development organisations, foundations and private sector firms, looking at policy and regulatory issues, business feasibility and technology adoption issues.

In addition, between June 2020 and March 2021 I undertook another 137 interviews specifically for this book. These were intended to explore why those interviewed thought things had happened the way they did, and to provide eyewitness accounts. A full list of these interviewees can be found in Appendix B, with descriptions of their current or former jobs.

I have written about the thirty-five years covered by the book using historical method and have sought to identify the key issues, drawing upon materials from fields as diverse as economics, business studies, development studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, politics and cultural studies. This approach is useful if one takes technology as largely socially defined and not fully objectively quantifiable, and one wants to understand what happened, who made it happen and what effects it had. Technology users have agency, and their daily lives are driven by a multitude of wide-ranging interests and capacities to use technology and to generate benefits from their use of technology. Technologies develop alongside each other at different rates, sometimes in conjunction with each other, sometimes differently in different places and times. To understand what happened and what effects it had may require an understanding of politics, psychology and the prestige often attached to technology on the continent: for example, in the case of the mobile phone, how it came to represent a new African version of aspiration and modernity.

Some of the source material, books, reports and articles referred to, which were largely my background reading, can be found in the Select Bibliography. There is a glossary of technical terms in

Appendix A.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a complex mixture of very different countries. The book combines material from sub-Saharan anglophone, francophone and lusophone countries. It makes no pretence at being definitive, but tries to make sense of a complex history of technology change for the informed general reader. It refers to experiences in forty-three of the forty-nine countries. Twenty-seven of them I have visited in some research capacity.

An overarching history encompassing all these countries cannot cover everything. A number of issues have had to be left out, including: manufacturing vs consumption, makers (3D printing, Arduinos, etc.), Open Source (which is only lightly touched on in Chapter 6), technologies’ environmental impact, virtual currencies like Bitcoin and digital identity. It also largely excludes the other part of my professional life – African broadcasting and media – except where it increasingly intersects with topics described in Chapter 5, such as streaming.

In terms of country names, I refer to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to distinguish it from Congo-Brazzaville and I use Guinea (not Guinea Conakry) to distinguish it from Guinea-Bissau. In the Prologue I use DRC's former name, Zaire, which was used at the time being described. I also use the European word ‘mobile’ rather than the North American word ‘cellular’, unless required by a quote in context. Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the focus of the book, is a very precise description, but occasionally the word Africa is used as shorthand or again in quotes. ‘At the time of writing’ is referred to at various points: this was May 2021. I have, in almost all instances, used US dollars as the currency of international business.

Sub-Saharan African countries do not always have annual sources of data, so what sometimes may seem like a strange pattern of data cited by year simply reflects what's available. I have also sought to cite data across years that demonstrate changes over time.

Although the ideas identified above show how I have sought to use the primary research and secondary sources, this is not a theoretical book.

How it all began

So, how do I fit into this very large picture? During supper with a couple of people in 1998 we fell to arguing about what development should be doing in Africa. The heart of the argument was best expressed in something I wrote subsequently:

If wealth is created by those using digital technologies, then Africa has to figure out how either to attract wealth to invest in its countries or to create ideas and products that will make wealth for them. Without successful wealth creation, how can the enormous costs of Africa's social needs be met or indeed wealth be redistributed in any way?

¹⁹

The same year I read Barlow's article about the internet in Africa, quoted in the previous section. Rereading it all these years later, it still makes me laugh with its combination of sharp insights and Californian craziness. The key passage that caught my eye at the time reads: ‘As my own general theory about the information economy developed over the years, I proposed that a good reality check for my ideas would be for Africa to surprise everyone by suddenly doing as I had: skipping industrialism entirely and leaping directly into the information era.’ ²⁰ It sounded intriguing …

In 2000 I visited four countries in sub-Saharan Africa – Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – came back to the United Kingdom (UK) and wrote an e-letter about what I found in terms of telecoms and internet activity:

Whereas before I went out to Africa everyone I spoke to was pressing me about the difficulties of the lack of infrastructure, I came away feeling that (however creaky) it is in place and can only improve. Agencies like Oxfam rightly contrast the costs of supplying this infrastructure with the need for funding things like fresh water supply. However the technology can't be ‘uninvented’ and Africa will have as strong a need to be connected as other parts of the world.

²¹

After that, people started sending me material … a guy from Madagascar sent me a thousand words on the internet there.²² Out of these contributions I created a weekly e-letter on telecoms and internet in Africa and a consultancy and research company called Balancing Act. Over time I attracted work that paid the bills and allowed me to gather the information that I published as an intelligence service that everyone could share.

Structure of the book

The book has three sections. Part I looks at how two technologies – mobile calling and internet – were made accessible to millions of sub-Saharan Africans. The Prologue and Chapter 1 highlight the difference between sub-Saharan Africa before and after liberalisation and privatisation. The Prologue also touches on the dishonesty that informs how business is done, which is detailed later in Chapter 7. Chapter 1 describes the struggles to roll out the new, private mobile operations and innovations, including pre-paid calling that encouraged low-income users. The sheer thirst for mobile calling meant that the sub-Saharan markets grew very rapidly. By contrast, in its early days, internet use was expensive, unreliable and not widely available, all of which contributed to limiting its potential. Chapter 2 describes the slow progress of internet diffusion, which accelerated with the introduction of cyber-cafes and Wi-Fi hot-spots. It closes by looking at how the supply of international and national fibre cables transformed the cost and quality of internet supply. Chapter 3 identifies how the resultant cheaper mobile internet and low-cost smartphones came together with online applications that sub-Saharan Africans wanted to use, creating wider internet use.

Part II examines how new services such as mobile money and e-commerce were built on these infrastructural foundations; what use Africans made of these new digital services; the part development actors played in encouraging these technologies; and the corruption that informed sub-Saharan Africa's telecommunications businesses. Chapter 4 examines how a combination of development funding and private finance laid the ground for the advent of mobile money services and how, over two decades, such services have evolved from simple cash transfer to a financial ecosystem offering insurance, loans and social payments. Chapter 5 explores how online businesses grew up providing media and entertainment, and how Africans used the internet and incorporated it into their lives. Chapter 6 looks at how mobile calling and internet provided the ‘magic dust’ for changing how development was, and is being, delivered and the key roles which those involved in development played in fighting for the policies that would help open up markets (Chapter 1) and would support non-market services. Chapter 7 examines the corruption and how it affects the way business is done in terms of getting licences and securing contracts and shapes the political economy of sub-Saharan African countries. A major theme of the chapter is how ‘patronage capitalism’ works in practice through the prism of the telecommunications industry.

Part III considers how start-up innovation has played a key role in opening up new opportunities and concludes with a provisional assessment of the overall changes that have occurred. Chapter 8 describes how sub-Saharan African start-ups have opened up opportunities to a wider number of people and hold the potential for breaking up ‘patronage capitalism’. It identifies the cultural and political challenges faced by both local and international start-ups. Taking the long view, Chapter 9 reflects on the success story of liberalisation, as well as considering the types of finance that drove change, the nature of the continuing digital divide and how the technologies have interacted with key aspects of people's social behaviours.

Too much writing about technology is in the future perfect tense. There is an over-urgent sense that something is going to happen ‘real soon now’. People in tech do not always appreciate that human behaviour often changes much more slowly than the rate of new technology development. A good example of that is sub-Saharan Africa's love affair with cash, which is still more widely used than its digital equivalent (see Chapter 4).

Notes

1 GSMA, The Mobile Economy: Sub-Saharan Africa (GSMA, 2020). The report provides 2019 data and unique subscriber numbers.

2 For a version of this methodology, see www.intrac.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Outputs-outcomes-and-impact.pdf (accessed 7 December 2021).

3 F. Bar, M.S. Weber and F. Pisani, ‘Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism’, New Media and Society 18.4 (2016), 17–39, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444816629474 (accessed 7 December 2021).

4 J. Burrell, Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa (Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group and African Studies Centre, University of Leiden, 2009), chapter 9.

5 S. Bailur, J. Donner, C. Locke, E. Schoemaker and C. Smart, Digital Lives in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda (Caribou, 2015), p. 24, www.cariboudigital.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1474-Caribou-Digital-Digital-Lives-in-Ghana-Kenya-and-Uganda.pdf (accessed 7 December 2021).

6 B. Larkin, Signal and Noise – Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008), p. 3.

7 J. Bryce, ‘Family time and television use’, in T. Lindof (ed.), Natural Audiences (Ablex Books, 1987), pp. 17–36.

8 Illiteracy is a global problem. For example, in the UK nine million adults are functionally illiterate; one in four British five-year-olds struggle with basic vocabulary: www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/03/literacy-white-working-class-boys-h-is-for-harry (accessed 7 December 2021).

9 R. Southwood, Face-to-face Survey – Overview Summary Results (Balancing Act, 2014), p. 8 for overall findings and example from Ghana of most important uses (radio on mobile: 55%).

10 Larkin, Signal and Noise.

11 See T. Standage, The Victorian Internet – The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers (Walker & Co, 1998).

12 J.P. Barlow, ‘Africa rising: everything you know about Africa is wrong’, Wired (1 January 1998), www.wired.com/1998/01/barlow-2/ (accessed 7 December 2021).

13 Ibid.

14 D.L. Hoffman, T.P. Novak and A. Schlosser, ‘The evolution of the digital divide: how gaps in internet access