The Next Wave of the Mobile Boom in Africa is not a Foregone Conclusion

These past few weeks have been hectic for me.

As if a swashbuckling swoop through Silicon Valley, including at one point a glide in a dirigible over Atherton and its fairytale mansions, was not enough, I topped it up with a glamorous dessert of giddy Dubai (this of course being before the “bankruptcy” announcement)!

But, you know what, it wasn’t all for fun. In fact, it was less about fun than about work. And I don’t need to tell you, I suppose, that the mashing of fun into work makes for a very heady mixture.

No wonder “the cloud” has gone all mushy in my brain. I have been shuttling between sessions on such everyday worries as why “special drawing rights” should be made more flexible to the benefit of poor countries laboring under the effects of global financial shocks and somewhat less earnest lectures on Intel’s water saving strategy for accomplishing more good instead of harm in the computer chipmaker’s global supply chain.

Nevertheless, I have managed to keep some faith with the subject matter of this blog series. 

In my next instalment, I shall be returning to the political economy of cloud-driven economic transformation, particularly from the perspective a global-level analysis, and with a focus on mobile-cloud interaction. Now though I thought I'd share some thoughts with you regarding the mobile end of that set-up – the “periphery” of the cloud so to speak.

My motivation derives from a brief audio piece that I recently got commissioned to do, which, happily, is now available in the cloud.

As you can hear for yourself, the recording touches on a number of widely-appreciated concerns about the economics of the mobile phone boom in African countries.

First up for appreciation is the obvious fact that the deployment of capital intensive telecom infrastructure in many African countries, and the resultant deepening of connectivity, have contributed significantly to GDP growth, and certainly to quality of life indicators too. There is also little doubt that the “connectivity” we mention above has been mainly of the basic voice communications/limited data variety.

This “first wave” of the mobile boom in Africa was largely a consequence of expansion and rapid mass adoption than any fundamental retooling of economic interactivity. It was infrastructure-driven and propelled by socialisation fundamentals of a longstanding, and rarely radical, nature.

Not surprisingly, we have already begun to see diminishing returns from this model of connectivity-inspired growth. It appears now that for each unit of economic or social gain, the corresponding level of investment has to climb. In many parts of East Africa, anecdotal evidence, with some scattered empirical support, has it that there is an alarming growth in the proportion of disposable personal income spent on electronic communications. In some instances, up to 50% of disposable income goes on telecommunication expenditure. Some econometrists believe that this amounts to money simply being diverted from equally or more vital social services to fund the growth of mobile infrastructure.

The point therefore is the need to quicken the pace of the second wave of the mobile boom, the so-called “next-generation services” phase, the one that we have all grown used to exploring in the ICT4D (ICT for development) space, in view of their supposedly more transformative effect.

My specific take on this belaboured subject is the importance of learning from experience. For Africa has been down this road before.

In the 1950s and 1960s, an infrastructure boom – very similar to what is happening in the telecommunications sector today – occurred in many African countries in the transport and utilities space. There was also an appreciable improvement in social infrastructure levels – schools, courts, hospitals, and the rest - to support this massive growth in physical capital. Africa considerably outflanked Asia as a destination of investment, by multiple factors in some years according to some of the entries in the UNCTAD Trade and Investment databases covering the period.

By the 70s however the infrastructure-led growth was flailing badly and much of Africa’s dynamism seemed long spent. No new waves of growth had been sparked by the original boom. The mounting stacks of debt were about the only memorial to a glorious age fast disappearing into oblivion. What happened?

Conflict happened. Conflicts amongst entrepreneurs, technocrats, corporations, policymakers, financiers, politicians and social reformers. In some places these conflicts degenerated into actual violence, whether of an acute or chronic nature. But such violence was merely the culmination of long-festering diseased conditions spawned by inter-sectional and factional discord over key issues of economic organisation. Simply put, once the infrastructure was in place the question now turned to the social arrangements that would ensure that they were put to their most productive and sustainable use.

It seems to a great deal of social commentators working in the African ICT space today that the promise of the mobile revolution on the continent is balanced on the brink of conflict and harmony (which very much includes “rule-based” competition), and that the huge proliferation of pilots and idea-stage enterprises, many with clear potential for system-shifting change, as against clear-cut success stories, owe to this tight-rope situation.

We all know which direction resolution should take, but the question is how to ensure that the momentum follows accordingly.

So we come back, as always, to the political economy of ICT-driven development – back, it seems, to the raison d’être of this blog-series.

Photo: Bright Simons, courtesy of mPedigree.net