How Africa is embracing "the cloud" on its own terms Mix mobile phones and power outages, and cloud-based services prove crucial.
by Sean Gallagher Ars Technica June 12 2012
You're probably one of the lucky people. You live within the coverage zone of a 3G or 4G cellular network, you have access to Internet at home and work over a connection measured in tens of megabits per second, and when you turn on your laptop (or your tablet, or your smartphone) you can see three, four, or twenty nearby WiFi networks. Cloud computing was invented for people like you-but it might turn out to be of even more benefit to the billions of people who don't own a computer-those dark places on Facebook's map of connections-and whose lives could be changed dramatically by a couple of mobile apps.
Take Africa, for instance, where an emerging information technology industry is betting its future on serving customers and businesses through mobile cloud applications. At the same time, governments and non-governmental organizations are betting that cloud-based technology can help transform their economies and societies, spurring improvements in education, public health, and the environment.
It sounds great, but making the cloud work in Africa remains a non-trivial problem. Just ask anyone who has run a data center there-they will tell you how expensive and frustrating it can be to work on a continent where it's often cheaper to connect back to an overseas data center from a co-location facility than to connect with a customer a few miles away; where most people don't even have landline, let alone wired Internet; and where the electrical grid could suddenly stop working for hours or even days at a time.
Those very challenges make Africa an increasingly attractive proving ground for cloud computing, though, especially for mobile applications. Out of the one billion people in Africa, only an estimated 140 million use the Internet, but over 600 million use mobile phones, according to data from the World Bank.
At the East Africa Outsourcing Summit in Nairobi on June 6, Kenya ICT Board CEO Paul Kukubo said, "The world is beginning to pay attention to the idea that even in Africa, if you can solve African problems, you can create an IT product that is attractive to the rest of the world." As the tagline of Shimba Technologies, a Nairobi-based mobile application developer, says, "If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."
While the problems Africa faces in terms of making cloud computing work are uniquely African, the solutions developed there could help to provide more universal access to Internet and cloud services elsewhere-including underserved areas here in the US.
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