Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa: How a Continent Is Escaping Silicon Valley's Long Shadow

"Invisible Users , tells a great story about development and technologies. It describes how a lot of second-hand computers and laptops have been imported into the country by local businesses in order to set up internet cafes. There is another angle to this, which is the country as a place where e-waste is accumulating. People are participating in that waste economy, so to speak. Then there’s a third idea as well, which is about entrepreneurship. People are developing new forms of value-creation activities, whether they are digital or analogue. That last dimension isn’t covered in Invisible Users , but is very much connected to Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa . This book directly deals with the aspirations and realities of digital entrepreneurs in Africa. Digital entrepreneurship is seen as a key driver for socio-economic change on the continent. There is this simple idea that if you give access to the internet, it will help generate economic value for an organization or a firm. So local businesses and local entrepreneurs are becoming agents of change. Different institutions are investing a lot of hope in this. Local policymakers, the United Nations, the World Bank, Silicon Valley firms including Facebook, are a few examples. They all talk about how Africa is a breeding ground for digital entrepreneurs, how there are over 600 tech hubs on the continent. All of these things confirm that digital revolution is happening at exponential rates. The book puts that digital entrepreneurship discussion within the local context where it actually takes place. It unpacks the hype, the myth that is being created and talks about digital entrepreneurship working within a very specific context. It doesn’t look at it working in terms of the vision that Silicon Valley people might have created about entrepreneurship. What they find is that the success and benefits are highly unevenly distributed. One of the underlying findings is that “contrary to expectations conveyed in popular discourses and management scholarship, the average African digital enterprise does not grow exponentially, does not scale internationally, does not produce digital infrastructure, does not attract venture capital (VC), and does not disrupt traditional industries.” People are creating different products that target local customers and local markets. In essence, they found that some of the positive socio-economic effects are there but just not at the rate and scale as many mainstream narratives have suggested. If entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers are going to understand the transformative impact of these developments, they need to avoid the Silicon Valley model and look at what’s happening on the ground and how things actually operate. China is helping to build the wider infrastructure of the internet across the continent. There is a lot of discussion about China in Africa, a China-Africa partnership and how China influences the shaping of information, infrastructure and society, and what this means for the global internet."