I got to witness the African startup revolution | Marcello Schermer | TEDxVienna

what if I told you that the future of the world is being built in Africa right now sounds like a pretty out-there idea right well don't take it from me this is what Mark Zuckerberg said after he left Nairobi in Kenya which he visited just a few weeks ago an honest trip he visited a lot of spaces one of them is called gearbox it's a makerspace and community in Nairobi Kenya that allows local entrepreneurs to use cutting-edge technologies such as 3d printers CNC machines laser cutters and much much more to get their businesses from an idea to a physical prototype and an actual global high-tech business made in Africa this is not the Africa you usually hear about right because when you do think about Africa what comes to your mind for most people unfortunately it's the bad stuff it's the crime it's the poverty or the newest trend it's Ebola but even for people who have positive associations they're mostly the usual stereotypes such as African sunsets elephants and safaris I also didn't really know what to expect when about three years ago I boarded an airplane and flew to Zimbabwe to join a five-day bus trip where we worked with local and international entrepreneurs on building businesses on the road between Herrara and Cape Town but what I learned on that trip completely blew me away and changed my perspective on the continent and entrepreneurship forever so inspired by the local talent the passion to drive and the opportunity that I saw on the trip I decided to quit my job and join an organization called seed stars which allowed me to travel to 16 countries all across the continent all with the goal of finding the best technology entrepreneurs that there are and helping them connect to global investors and global attention and so while traveling from South Africa to Senegal from Angola to Uganda and from Ethiopia to Morocco I just learned a lot about the continent about entrepreneurship on the continent and about what we can learn from entrepreneurs that are building businesses in Africa so I'm here today because I want to show you how all across the continent entrepreneurs are building global businesses by solving local problems that the rest of the world didn't even know existed but first I want to do a few basics I'm sure you all knew that Africa is not a country right I hope so it's actually about 54 countries on one continent there's over 2,000 indigenous languages and there's over 1.1 billion people that live there today and it's expected to grow to over 2 billion people just in the next few decades and so it's needless to say that if you fly from the north to the to the continent to the south it's a 10-hour flight if we fly from the west to the east it's an eight-hour flight so it's a huge continent and actually all of these countries you see there would actually fit into the continent if you would put them there so it's humongous on top of that it's the youngest continent in the world by far it has a median age of just 19 years so what that means is there's over 600 million people on the continent there are 19 years or younger and that represents an incredible opportunity for young people to reinvent how things are done locally but also reinvent how things are done for the rest of the world and lastly it's one of the fastest-growing economies across the world the GDP is growing at about 4.4 percent on average but you have countries that are growing at about 10 percent or more such as Ethiopia or Ivory Coast but so despite having all of these different stories inside we still reduce the continent - essentially a single narrative in modern mainstream media and that narrative changes all the time such as these Economist covers show but despite these Economist covers that basically does have either one good or one bad story there are so many parallel realities that are happening at the same time and the one that I got exposed to is the one of entrepreneurship and the story I want to tell you about today is the one of startups and entrepreneurs mushrooming all across the continent and being part of what I call the African startup revolution and so the modern African startup ecosystem started roughly in 2010 when a few people in Nairobi got together to build the iHub which is a co-working space and essentially became the first physical community for the Entrepreneurship space in Nairobi the model became as an example for hubs all over the world and today we have over 300 such hubs in over 35 countries across the continent and they're working with entrepreneurs from the beginning until the end of their journey and these entrepreneurs just in the Year 2015 raised over 200 million US dollars for the venture a number that has been eclipsed this year already a couple of months ago and so what I want to do today is I want to take you on a journey I want to take you on a journey to four countries and show you four entrepreneurs that are building incredibly innovative businesses that are not just innovative for the country where they are but actually have global relevance and could be used by everyone fairly soon so the first stop on our journey takes us to Ghana Ghana is an english-speaking country in West Africa that's home to about 25 million people it's also home to the meltwater entrepreneurship school of technology or mest in short which is probably one of the best entrepreneurship programs on the continent it takes people to a one-year journey where and as a full time program they learn about entrepreneurship and they don't just graduate with a degree but they also graduate with a business and these businesses are world-class they've attracted international investors from tech stars to Y Combinator's to 500 startups one of the businesses is called ash Arriba which means child of the church in Aachen a Ghanaian local language it was started by a few gaining on Tripura realize that despite churches having a crucial role in society not just in Africa but all across the world there's still pretty much no tech businesses that manage with pen and paper at best and so what they decided to do is to build the Church management platform that allows churches to know who the members are to talk to the members and have the members speak to them and to each other but most importantly it allowed churches to get money from people through mobile payment which is pretty important for a church right and so what they basically did is they they took the church that hundreds of millions of people already interact with on a physical level gave it a digital home and basically brought worshiping into the 21st century which i think is pretty cool the next stop takes us to Rwanda in 1994 Rwanda suffered one of the worst genocides where over a million people lost their life in less than two months today the country is rebounds and is now being called the Switzerland of Africa where many it's a small country just has 11 million people but because of the size the government has done an incredible job at implementing incredible innovation in the country so today you can renew your ID by clicking a button on your feature phone no offices to visit nothing else to do today you can apply for open up a business with a simple online application no forms to fill nothing and most importantly the government launched a hundred million dollar fund to actually invest in local ICT entrepreneurs and help them grow and scale and the last thing that the government is doing they're investing in drones they're building the first drone Airport in the world it's being built right now and just last week they launched the first commercially commercial drone program in which they use drones to bring medical supplies from the capital of Kigali into rural hospitals and so with Kigali being it with Ronda being a very small and hilly country medical supplies are pretty much a mercy of nature if the weather is bad stuff doesn't arrive people die and so the government now has a system of drones that can fly from the capital to rural hospitals and drop off necessary medical supplies in a matter of minutes rather than hours or day days and save lives in the process isn't that cool now we're traveling south we're going to Mozambique maybe people heard about it because of the beaches I don't know but it's beautiful The Economist recently ran a story on Mozambique and called it a country at civil war and the most indebted country on the continent I was during July and while the country definitely has its fair share of issues what I saw was not the bad stuff but I saw people who were working incredibly hard at making a difference and changing the life locally for themselves and globally one of these people is claude jean-pierre he built a business called blackboxtv which essentially is a TV streaming box just like the Apple TV that you know but what's interesting is that it's built with emerging markets in mind which usually don't have reliable access to Internet as much as you have it here in Vienna so the box cannot just stream from the internet but it can also stream from other boxes that are close by so when the Internet is bad you see you can still watch house of cards or whatever you're watching isn't that cool and so we're going back to West Africa for the last example we're going to Nigeria you probably know it from all the spam emails that you get right but there's actually much more than people doing spam emails so it's the biggest country on the continent it has a hundred and seventy million people living there that's basically half of Europe living in one country the capital of Lagos nobody really knows how many people actually live there but it goes from 20 million to about 25 million people that's almost three times the size of Austria in one city and so with that power both economically and in terms of people the country is slowly becoming the economic and innovation powerhouse of the continent and not just in technology the movie industry of Nigeria called Nollywood is actually producing more movies every year than Hollywood and it's the second biggest movie industry in the world if you count the number of movies that are being output every year and who's heard of Nollywood here exactly there's like 15 hands maybe it's crazy right but not just in the creative industry in the Indian trip Renier ships places businesses doing incredible stuff that one company I want to show you is hello tractor it's a company that essentially built a service that allows rural farmers to share tractors kind of like an uber for tractor if you want to call it like that just just with the big big difference that it doesn't need an app it doesn't need an internet connection it doesn't need a smart phone and it doesn't need a credit card so people can use whatever phone they have to get access to a tractor and pay for it in kind of a timeshare way and that gives the rural farmers that need access to these productivity enhancing technologies the most access to their technologies and helps them improve the livelihoods of them and their families and so these are just a few examples of companies I'd go on on and on and on but these are just examples of a few come that are solving a local problem but that I'm sure you'd agree with me has global relevance and can be used all across the world but what enables them to build global businesses from wherever they are it's because the Internet has democratized access to information in a way that today anyone anywhere in the world can build anything he or she wants and on top of that entrepreneurs on the continent that in emerging markets in general have access to information that you don't necessarily have in Vienna which is local problems and so why are they global because they're not just identifying local problems there's finding local problems that have global relevance but are not being seen by the crowd that's in in the West that's chasing after Silicon Valley or watching pokemons down the highway and so the world is noticing that there's a revolution coming up and so most of the Silicon Valley programs such as Y Combinator tech stars and so on and so forth have done programs on the continent to invest in local entrepreneurs but what's more important is that the local community is also noticing and starting to invest there are over 200,000 millionaires on the African continent and some of them are starting to become angel investors and invest into startups all across the board one of them is Tony Illuma Lou a Nigerian billionaire and entrepreneur probably one of the richest men on the continent and he recently launched a program called the Tony Illumina foundation entrepreneurship program and it's a program that every single year picks a thousand entrepreneurs from across the continent and invests fifteen thousand dollars into each and every one of them which is an incredible amount of entrepreneurs and money that's being invested every single year and so when initiatives like that the question comes what can we learn from entrepreneurs on the continent what can we learn from them that would make us better as well and so there's three things I want to share with you number one is things simple and it's easier said than done of course but if you build something that only people with iPhones can use well there is not that many it's a lucrative market but there's not that many people there's about 6 billion people in the world that have a feature phone what about those second find local problems that have global impact because that gives you an information advantage over people that are here in Vienna New York or London and the third one is leapfrog legacy technology think when you build something think of a blank sheet of paper and think how you can do things differently and better with the technology you have today rather than having to respect the technology of the past and so with that I think that today you see just about 0.1 percent of global high-tech exports coming from Africa but with the things I just showed you and the initiatives I've showed I think you'll soon be able to have an African made hardware device in your hand or use African made software and it's built by incredible people that all across the continent are innovating and developing new things so if you put the energy out there and you go explore the African startup ecosystem across the continent for yourself I'm sure you'd be surprised but how many more innovations and technologies like these you would find so I can only agree with Mark Zuckerberg the future of the world is being built in Africa and if we stop thinking about how Africa can be more like us but rather start thinking about how we can be more like Africa then we're going to bring this future to this part of the world sooner rather than later thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 46,943

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Austria, Technology, Africa, Entrepreneurship, Global issues, Social Change

Id: TgqZONIbt8k

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2016