 So I'm gonna talk about innovation in Africa and as is customary when you talk about Africa You have to have this picture of of Africa from space and everyone says look It's the dark continent and it's a bad thing, but I think it's a good thing because we live in an age where we don't have electricity to waste and Innovation that happens in Africa is just truly remarkable. This is something called a dollas and Eric Merrifield is the most famous inventor or innovator that you've never heard of in 1963 and a little Town in South Africa. There was a huge storm that ripped up the harbor and he came up with this from the from a child's toy that let him Save the harbors. You just dump them in the harbors the waves crash over it's used in every harbor in the world So like the map shows there's very little electricity the UN says one and a half billion people in the world Don't have access to electricity in Africa It's something like 70% of people off the grid something like 500 million people So how do you keep something? Oh, there's the dollas is that's Robin Island in the background by the way How do you keep something cool without electricity? Well, there's a great Nigerian example of what's called a pot within a pot you get two pots You fill them with sand in between cover it with water and the natural way is that the heat extracts from the middle of the pot And keeps this cool the food cool now. We're talking about Rural environments with no electricity So in the last 10 years six of the fastest growing economies in the world have been in Africa We know this is true because the economists told us and all of this is being done because there's a resource boom We've got gold. We've got minerals. We've got stuff underneath it Africa has 14% of the world's population Most of them under the age of 30 and we are where China was when its boom years began so I come from Johannesburg, which is a mining town and I think that the gold of today is mobile People like to call Africa a mobile first continent But I'm telling you that Africa is a mobile only continent and what we see in Africa is the purest form of innovation Innovation out of necessity. We're not talking about angry words We're talking about things that people do to make their lives better So this is not just a cell phone. These are the two most popular phones in Africa. It's a radio it's a torch and it's also a computer that is the first experience that hundreds of millions of Africans will see the internet on for The first time if you think of Wireless broadband as a car speeding on a highway Then SMS is the paint on the road and about five layers below that is a thing called USSD and that is the technology that you can use on a phone like that to get Gmail to send Gmail to read Facebook To update your Facebook status. So I think mobile is an enabler It's the 21st century equivalents of the railroad the differences. It's a bullet train The most vulnerable people I think in society are young women given the taboo of AIDS and that it's it's it's not proper to ask an Older information about sex or child prevention There are fantastic services that send information straight to young women who are able to find out just the basics Real information not old wives tells things that can save their lives and you can do this by SMS Or there's an even cleverer system that was developed in Cape Town called mix it It's a remarkable story in its own right. They call themselves Africa's largest social network They've got 50 million users which is twice as many as as Facebook And there's a guy called Marlon Park who's brother was a drag addict And he started using this chat system that costs a few cents a message to speak to other drag addicts to get them off it It's front line support for people who are in this environment They don't even have the money to make a phone call let alone send an SMS. It's truly remarkable It's a picture of a farmer in Ghana. You know, he can't Google the price of corn He doesn't know anything about commodities, but their services that tell him which market He can go to and get the best price for his form, you know, not every angry birds But something that'll make his life better. We've all heard about in PESA Which is this fantastic example of mobile money something like 80% of adults in Africa unbanked 326 million people don't have a bank card, but what they do have is an SMS a SIM card and and Africa has 650 million cell phones. It's growing faster than any other region in PESA is just this amazing thing where 10% of the Kenyan GDP goes through in PESA in increments of less than $20, but there's an even more Informal methodology in Africa and that is airtime. These are slips that you can buy. That's the equivalent of four dollars That's eight dollars. You send that 12 digit number to somebody and you can actually pay them It's quite remarkable and it's a hidden currency that is is an example of the way amazing way out of Necessity people have found a way to share money with other people Even more clever is this thing called a please call me So the first line is the please call me the rest is a is an advertising message from the network that uses They make the money from it But it's kind of like a way people can send messages to each other send to then one then another to it is a Predetermined message. It's kind of like a digital morse code and the poorest of the poor who can't make a phone call You can't afford SMS's are able to do this pays you go is a brilliant business model wasn't invented in South Africa was pioneered here as By Vodacom to use cell phone. This is a bobby example of pay as you go sell a solar you buy this station You buy to rent a charger's lights during the day you can sell the spare capacity to your neighbor and and How'd you bring the internet to Africa? This is a great thing called the mesh potato invented by a man called Steve song that as long as you connect a whole bunch of Them together they can share the internet with people and as long as that one of them is touching the the internet You can get out of there So all of this just shows the incredible innovation that people in South in Africa have come up with I don't believe that the gold is under the ground. I believe that we are the gold and This is not that catchy phrase innovation at the edge. This is innovation over the edge