[kictanet] Is Google good for Africa?

Mon Oct 10 20:01:37 EAT 2011

This article appeared on the dotafrica linkedin list; I cannot locate it on the Africa Report website, though.
Is Google good for Africa? 
DCA inNEWS

With an eye on its future profits, Google is investing millions to enable an army of tech-savvy young Africans to build the web from the bottom up 
and put their continent on the global information map. 
_ 
The Africa Report is a monthly magazinebased in Paris France,which is the English version of the highly respected "Groupe Jeune Afrique", which has been the leading economic, political and cultural media throughout Africa and worldwide. 

The Africa Report thus provides more than 400,000 African and international readers with 
expert analysis of Africa's fast-changing political and economic 
landscapes.It has established itself as the international publication of reference dedicated to African affairs.  It is the guide used by decision makers to anticipate economic and 
political changes in Africa and relied upon for the expertise of an 
independent editorial team in its surveys, sector reports and 
country focus published in each issue.  Its recognized high-quality 
coverage of the African business environment is combined with the widest pan-African and international circulation.

Is google good for Africa?   WRITTEN BY GEMMA WARE IN DAKAR:   
http://www.theafricareport.com/201106285165490/five-stories/is-google-good-for-africa.html

As the influence of companies like Google grows, the continent's techies are aware of the urgency to stake their own territorial claim. 
 An African-led initiative is pushing for a .africa suffix aimed at breaking down the dominance of foreign hosting sites.  Around 90% of African websites are registered as .com, says DotConnectAfrica's Sophia Bekele. When it costs $19 to register a .com site versus around $50 for a 
.co.ke in Kenya, the choice is obvious, but it is not helping to 
populate the African web.  

With an eye on its future 
profits, Google is investing millions to enable an army of tech-savvy 
young Africans to build the web from the bottom up and put their 
continent on the global information map.

"The problem with Africa is that there isn't enough information," Carlo D'Asaro Biondo, one of Google's vice presidents for the region, 
told the crowd. In front of him, laptop screens flickered in the dimly 
lit lecture hall as rows of young Senegalese techies tapped away at 
their keyboards. On stage, large breeze blocks in bright primary colours lay piled up in pre-planned abandon. One event in the US tech giant's 
G-Africa series, the G-Senegal meeting in late February brought together more than 600 web developers and HTML-literate IT students at 
Université Cheikh Anta Diop. They are all part of Google's plan to 
create an African army to help it build the web from the bottom up.

Google has Africa firmly in its sights. As new fibreoptic cables bring down the cost of bandwidth, and 
manufacturers race to bring out affordable smartphones - the most basic 
of which still costs about $100 - the internet is going mobile in 
Africa. Already 40% of Google searches on the continent come from 
internet users on mobile phones. Google expects user numbers in Africa 
to grow from 14 million in 2010 to 800 million by 2015. Mobile 
information has been the midwife to the uprisings across the Arab world. Videos, photos and comments posted on Facebook, Twitter and 
Google-owned YouTube fanned the flames of revolt.

Seen from the Googleplex back in California, Africa remains a big, 
perplexing blank, an obstacle in the way of Google's brazen goal to 
organise the world's information. But it has seen the future - 
one that will hold 43 million middle-class Africans by 2030, according 
to the World Bank. By investing now into Africa's internet ecosystem, 
Google hopes to hardwire it with tools that will make people click 
through to its websites.

While there is an average of one web domain for every 94 people in the world, there is only one for every 10,000 Africans. An empty web with less 
local and relevant content means fewer reasons to go online and a dearth of revenue for Google, which principally earns money by selling 
targeted advertising on its search engine.

It is also embedding itself in the internet's evolving geopolitics. As authoritarians tighten their media-monitoring screws, buying 
military-calibre cyber surveillance software, Google will be monitoring 
them. Since 2010, Google has been publishing statistics on the requests 
it receives from governments to remove information from its websites. 
During Egypt's February revolution, the tracker clearly showed when the 
country's internet was cut. As part of its response, Google put to use a start-up called SayNow that it had acquired just a few weeks before to 
create a 'speak-to-tweet' service. It allowed Egyptians to leave 
voicemail messages that were posted on Twitter as audio files.

The company has won fans - and sceptics - for its 'don't be evil' motto. It got burnt in China and its 
reputation suffered after it agreed to censor search results. It will 
not be doing that again in a hurry. But by shining a light on 
censorship, Google has helped democracy activists expose politicians who meddle with the freedom of information. In late May, an Egyptian court 
charged the ousted President Hosni Mubarak and two of his ministers $90m for cutting telecoms services.

During the revolution, Egyptian activists were fearful of what US multinationals might do with their private information. "Anyone who holds this amount of information needs to be very careful 
with it," says Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian activist behind the "We are all Khaled Said" Facebook group. But when Google's property is attacked, it will make noise. In June, the company pointed the finger at the Chinese government after disrupting attacks on Gmail users, including US 
government officials and Chinese political activists.

Google's play on the continent is seductive and transformative. It has launched dozens of projects in Africa. Its search engine is now 
available in 31 African languages, including Ewe, Sesotho, Wolof and 
Amharic. A $1.25m project will digitise Nelson Mandela's documentary 
archives. Another pilot in Nigeria - the Get African Business Online 
project - is helping small businesses to build websites. Google runs 
mapping projects to help chart unmapped areas (see box page 22). It is 
also forging relationships with Africa's more tech-savvy 
administrations. A web facility tailor-made for Kenya's treasury is 
helping constituents monitor the implementation of infrastructure, 
education and health projects launched under the government's Economic 
Stimulus Programme.

Google's assault on Africa is coming at a time when the company is facing 
growing hostilities elsewhere. In late March, its plan to monetise 15m 
digitally scanned books for the Google Book Project was barred by a New 
York court. Meanwhile, the European Commission is probing whether Google is abusing its dominant position in online search by prioritising its 
own services.

MISSION: CREATE CONTENT Google's push to create local content is not unique to 
Africa and it forms a central part of its expansion strategy into 
emerging markets with low internet penetration. So far, the 
coast has been relatively clear. While its biggest rival, Microsoft, has an established presence in Africa, Facebook and Twitter have not yet 
defined strategies for the continent. Yahoo email addresses are still 
commonplace across both anglophone and francophone Africa, but Google 
has pretty much won the battle for African search.

Back in Silicon Valley, it used to be hard to get attention for African 
projects. Now, it is a different story. "If you do something that's 
involved in Africa, it's a very feel-good thing around Google," says 
Steven Levy, author of a new book on Google called In the Plex. Google, 
which is famed for employee perks such as free gourmet food and onsite 
medical care, allows its engineers to use 20% of their time on other 
projects. "What Google is doing in Africa is very sexy," says the firm's Senegal representative, Tidjane Deme.

Off the back of a successful final quarter of 2010 - which brought in 
profits of $2.5bn - Google is in the midst of an Africa recruitment 
drive, with more than 30 posts open across the continent.  Its 
staff in Africa has grown from 10 in 2006 to 65 today. In December, it 
secured a huge coup by poaching Kenyan Ory Okolloh - founder of web 
platform Ushahidi and a prominent blogger and activist - as its first 
policy manager for Africa. The usually ebullient Okolloh has remained 
tight-lipped since she started, and declined to give an interview to The Africa Report.

WE COULD BE HEROES  African googlers have begun to get themselves noticed. At first, Google was 
unsure how to react to the swell of admiration for its marketing 
executive Wael Ghonim, held aloft as a hero of the Egyptian revolution 
after his detention at the hands of the security services. "They were 
conscious, as a global corporation, of the implications of this," says 
Levy. But they realised soon enough the value of his profile-raising. On 12 February, five days after his release, Google's official Twitter 
account said: "We're incredibly proud of you @Ghonim & of course 
will welcome you back when you're ready."

Others are going on to great things. Kenyan Nyimbi Odero, Google's former lead for West Africa, told The 
Africa Report he saved the Nigerian Electoral Commission around $100m in procurement costs with in-house voter registration software he and his 
team developed for 2011's elections.

Spreading its tentacles further and deeper into the world's internet is a fundamental part of Google's business plan. In the year to end December 2010, 41%, or $11.9bn, of its $29.3bn in 
revenue came from outside the US and the UK, up from 37% in 2008. 
Despite its push for global information-sharing and transparency, Google will not reveal how much it is investing in Africa, although it admits 
that it is not yet making a profit.

"Our business model works only when you have enough advertisements and a lot of users online, and that's the environment we are trying to create in 
Africa," explains Nelson Mattos, Google's vice president of 
product management and engineering for Europe, the Middle East and 
Africa (EMEA). "Right now the goal is not to be profitable. We are not 
focusing on sales except for South Africa, where you already have an 
environment of enough users online, enough traffic online and enough 
advertisers who want to take advantage of that. In the rest of Africa, 
it's about bringing people online and making sure that they take 
advantage of internet services first."

With a platform like Baraza - an online question-and-answer site that Google launched in October 
2010 after success with similar pilots in China and the Middle East - 
users are persuaded to create content on a Google platform. "It has 
become extremely successful and we are starting to see a lot of the 
content that got created through the Q & A to surface in the Google 
search," says Mattos. Another beta project, Google Trader, launched in 
Uganda and Ghana, acts as a web and mobile marketplace for everything 
from rice-milling equipment to used Hondas.

Such crowd-sourcing is central to Google's global strategy. It stems from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin's belief in an 
open-source internet model, where tools are made freely available to 
developers. It is the driving principle behind its Android smartphone 
platform, which now has over 150,000 apps, but - like its African 
investments - has yet to bring in billions in revenue.

Since mid-2009, Google has been busy moulding a new generation of bright, 
tech-savvy Africans who are incentivised to evangelise. Part of a growing young elite with the money to buy laptops, internet data 
bundles and smartphones, these geeks will rule Africa's online universe.

But while Dakar's Google Technology User Group (GTUG) - a 50-strong network of young developers that receives a stipend each month from Google to 
host meetings - may know how to work the tools, they have little 
financial support to create new applications. Ibrahima Dieng, one of 
GTUG's leaders, says: "People come and try things out, but they don't 
publish." Many are students, without the credit cards needed to buy 
space online.

LEARNING TO ADAPT Senegalese web engineer Hovi Kokuvi Amen Hovi says he is earning €11 a day from 
AdSense adverts hosted on two news-based websites he operates. He has 
been lucky - he can get at the money via a French bank account. Funds 
earned through AdSense used to be sent with a Citibank cheque in US 
dollars, a system not well adapted to serve developers in largely 
unbanked economies. In May, Google agreed to make payments via Western 
Union in Senegal.

Google has not yet made the biggest commitment it could to Africa - to build a data centre, the beeping heart of its web operations. However, it has set up several dozen caches with African mobile operators and internet service 
providers. So, when somebody wants to watch a YouTube video or access 
Google Maps, the request does not travel all the way to a European data 
centre, but is accessible via a local store.

Back in 2008, Google provided an undisclosed part of a $410m investment in 
O3b, a series of low-orbit satellites that would bring fibre-speed 
broadband to the developing world from 2013. Google also 
recently opened a point of presence (POP) in Nigeria to serve West 
Africa, effectively an entry point to its global network of data 
centres. There is already an active POP in South Africa, and Google 
plans to build one in Kenya to keep local traffic within Africa.

Just how Google plans to recoup such investments remains unclear. Some of 
its products could become lucrative if they reach critical mass. One is 
Gmail SMS, which allows Gmail users in certain countries to send 50 free text messages from their emails. When users receive an SMS to their 
inbox, they get another five free messages.

"They're sowing now so they can reap the advertising funds down the line," says Banky Ojutalayo, a former senior manager for value-added services 
at Glo Mobile Ghana. He suggests that once the service had built up a 
large enough user base, Google would consider selling short adverts at 
the end of each message - a potential goldmine.

African mobile operators' eagerness to team up with Google shows the power of its global brand. But sometimes the company falls foul of the higher standards it sets 
for itself. It was criticised last year for exercising loopholes to pay 
an overseas tax rate of just 2.4% in the US, cutting its tax bill by 
$3.1bn. Google insists that it "complies with tax law in every country 
in which it operates," including seven countries in Africa.

As the influence of companies like Google grows, the continent's techies 
are aware of the urgency to stake their own territorial claim. 
An African-led initiative is pushing for a .africa suffix aimed at 
breaking down the dominance of foreign hosting sites. Around 90% of 
African websites are registered as .com, says DotConnectAfrica's Sophia 
Bekele. When it costs $19 to register a .com site versus around $50 for a .co.ke in Kenya, the choice is obvious, but it is not helping to 
populate the African web.

Nigerian developer Saheed Adepoju, who launched his own version of Apple's iPad 
tablet called Inye last year, says some of his peers are worried Google 
is trying to take over their market. Adepoju tells them that they should not worry. "We know the local system better than they do. It's not 
going to be hard to compete with them."

Whatever its profit projections, Google's African advance is a long play. It 
sees that the continent is getting richer and more connected. Africa's 
sparsely populated internet is a money-making opportunity for Google and the army of African developers it is training to help fill in the gaps. Africa's future is an online and a mobile one, and Google has raised 
its flag first. 

Original Article
http://www.theafricareport.com/201106285165490/five-stories/is-google-good-for-africa.html
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Matunda Nyanchama, PhD, CISSP; mnyanchama at aganoconsulting.com
Agano Consulting Inc.;  www.aganoconsulting.com; Twitter: nmatunda;  Skype: okiambe
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