 Thank you. Thank you. It is good to connect with you after so many years. This is really my summer report. This is what I did during the summer looking at what is happening on the continent in terms of just expanding connectivity, which is essential for the ability of the continent to connect to the rest of the world, but also to tap into these large quantities of scientific and technical information that is available so that Africans don't have to reinvent everything. One of those advantages of late commerce is that you can harvest what has been generated by your predecessors. So that's one of the reasons I got interested in looking at broadband. But before we get started, let's just get a kind of a good picture of people talk about Africa and then say, look, I've just been to Africa. And I was really building this wonderful school somewhere or I constructed a well. This is what you do. This is a comment around my students who are in the audience. But this is Africa is a fairly large place and people don't appreciate how big the place is. And many of my colleagues think that since there are 53 countries, it must be the size of the United States because the US has 50 states. But let me just give you a sense of the scale of the continent. You can fit the US, India, China, all of Western Europe, India, Argentina, and half sufficient room to sneak in the United Kingdom. So it's actually a fairly large place. And this underlies some of the challenges associated with getting to do anything on the continent. It's just the sheer scale or the size of the place. And this is one of the reasons I think the broadband internet, especially the optical fiber connections, are really interesting is that you can't do it on a small scale. You can't say, let's just connect between South Africa and Mozambique. And if it works, then we'll extend it. You actually have to do the whole thing connected to the rest of the world. You can't do it just doing small pilots here and there. Don't really work given the size of the continent. And obviously, there have been other attempts to address infrastructure problems with very fairly limited railway network, very limited power transmission cabins, and even the primary roads are fairly limited. Anybody who has tried traveling around the continent will have experienced a lot of difficulties getting around. And the internet has been probably the most interesting part, especially I think the most dramatic advancement has been in the area of mobile phones, and partly because they are their own infrastructure, essentially. And having been the fastest growing region in terms of connectivity in the world is Africa. But a lot of it has been fairly limited by kind of a low capacity. I think the best, probably the best expression of this is an attempt by a South African company to show that, in fact, it's really difficult to transmit. Can you set this up? This is called the Windstone Index. I don't know if you have heard of the Windstone Index. This is a South African company that decided that given the low speeds provided by existing companies, they would try to see if you could use a pigeon to transmit memory sticks across companies. This is a 50-mile distance, and so I really would like to show this. This is actually quite interesting. This is a competition between a pigeon and the telecom company in South Africa. This is one of those advantages of advances in new technology. You wouldn't have done this a few years ago. It's only possible because of advances in connectivity. This was done on the 10th of this month, and the pigeon actually won, was able to deliver the memory stick. They downloaded the data in about two hours. By that time, the South African telecom company had succeeded in delivering only 4% of the data. I think there is a real market for pigeons now in Africa at the moment. This, to me, really summarizes the challenges that the continent actually—I've always wanted to have a very clear index of how you measure transmission of data, and certainly Winston. This is the name of the pigeon. It's really the best way to do it. It has its own followers, about 7,000 followers on Facebook at the moment, has its own Facebook page. How do I get out of this so that I can go beyond the—yes, that would be very helpful. I was in Tanzania at the launching of the SICOM fiber optic cable, which is really the first time we've had that connectivity on the eastern coast of Africa, which has been essentially cut off. They are as a guest of the president, and the president did a great job in explaining to me how the system actually functions. We're hoping that one day we could have him come and speak here, but he was extremely excited about the potential contributions of this infrastructure to the continent. I think the one idea that I was left with listening to him was he had this vision that for the first time now, you can have one teacher teach thousands and thousands of Tanzanian kids in the sciences without having to train a lot of new scientists. He was basically looking at the possibility of being able to connect into courses that are offered in various universities around the world. He had other examples of what he thought would be some of the most significant contributions of this facility to his country. I took the trouble of going down with the manhole so that I could actually see this cable. It's a very modest looking facility. I also just wanted to report here that as of this weekend, the cable from London to Lagos just landed. The west Africa is also being supplemented by an additional cable. We have the original SART-3 which has very low capacity utilization, probably roughly 5% capacity utilization. We have the one I really want to talk about is the SICOM that starts in South Africa and goes all the way to London. They have great names. My favorite ones are the main one. This is a, there can't be any other one other than the main one. Then there's a tiny one connecting Madagascar with Mauritius. It's called Lyon. This is a dramatic change. All these proportions are serious proportions that are going to be basically implemented and for a lot of them reconstruction has actually started. We are looking to a continent that's going to look radically different over a very short period. I think the only analogy I can draw from this is the impact of mobile phones which not long ago they were basically a dream for most Africans. We call them mobile phones because, not because we carry them in our pockets, but because the first mobile phone developed by Ericsson in 1956 was called SART, it was called Mobile Phone A. It weighed about 42 kilos. But it was the first time you had the technology you could move from one place to another and be able to communicate without being physically connected. It was inconceivable then that you could ever have this kind of device used outside the military or the police force. You needed a car to carry it around. I don't know if anybody here is old enough to have owned a car phone. This is actually owned a car phone. Subsequently, Martin Cooper at Motorola spent 10 years basically miniaturizing the car phone. He had this vision that this is a technology that should be available to everybody else. When these mobile phones arrived in Africa, he quickly found not only new markets, but also derivative products. That guy was selling rubber bands. That was his market. Obviously, the Africans wanted to be very closely connected to their friends and relatives. I think this is probably the first Bluetooth. I can't think of, I always think of Bluetooth having been invented somewhere in Africa. It's not clear whether this was in some dispute, where this picture was taken. It was either Ethiopia or the Gambia, one of those. Now we have a very dramatic development, which is the ability to transmit money using mobile phones, the so-called Mpesa, the mobile money system used in Kenya. It's now being used in about 25 countries, a typically Kenyan invention. Nobody could have anticipated that such an industry would develop so quickly. It's now quite ambiguous. We don't know whether the cell phone companies will take over banks or banks will start taking over cell phone companies. But a new standard in transmitting money has been established just by the mere availability of mobile phones. The limiting factor for getting anything significant down has been basically the absence of broadband internet, limited by basically the lack of fiber optical cables. The eastern coast of Africa has probably been the longest coastline anywhere in the tropics without connection. And the reason it's possible to do that now is just a dramatic decline in the price of laying fiber optic cables. It's basically an order of magnitude decline over the last 10 years. So practically anybody can now do it. It's just really cheap. But the driving force is especially for connecting the eastern coast of Africa has been the timetable for the World Cup because the Europeans basically would not allow the World Cup to take place in South Africa if they can't watch it. And so the critical deadline has been driven by SOC. I would never have thought at all that sport would have such a significant impact on the transformation of African economies, especially in the domain of infrastructure. Certainly much more significant than what the development agencies have done in that region in the last two decades or so. And following that is this proposal by Google and its partners, the other $3 billion, which is to launch 16 satellites in space with providing sufficient in orbit redundancy so that any place in the tropics would be able to have access. Unlike fiber optic cables, you don't have to do wiring. You just need to give coordinates and then be able to tele-direct one of the antennas on each of these satellites to your specific locations. I think it's actually not working. The launching will be done, they will start launching this end of next year. So we envisage basically a continent that will be very dramatically transformed over a very short period. And the key public policy questions really relate to one, what it means for at least three critical areas. One is the area of access devices, whether the continent has sufficient policies to enable everybody who can subscribe to these services to actually have access to the services, which is basically the area of devices, computers, and other utilities. The second has to do with the content, how the continent is managing the area of not only being able to access content generated by others, but also being able to generate its own content and make it available to the global market. And the third area I wanted to talk about a bit has to do with the ability of the continent to contribute through the development of applications as the continent basically joins the rest of the global community. And these are issues that are being debated quite extensively because one is the pace at which the connectivity has been done, hasn't given most government sufficient time to adjust their policies and laws to reflect the capabilities that are already being installed at the moment. So the institution's laws and policies are lagging way behind the capabilities that exist and this might become essentially the critical limiting factor to the ability of the continent to tap into the vast quantities of knowledge available worldwide. Initially, much of the interest has been around basically call centers, basically the ability to provide call centers which everybody has gone into. But the companies that are laying these cables are looking at it a lot more broadly, they are looking at the margins of e-commerce, for example, and looking to have possibilities of radically new industries being developed. I was able to, during the summer, meet some of the young people working on animation, for example, something they couldn't do effectively before. But now they are connected, getting connected to large companies in the, particularly in the U.K. and the U.S., and they are starting to move into animation, production of cartoons. Cartoons are very popular in Africa, I think cartoons are popular everywhere. But this is an area that a lot of young people are really interested in. And it's kind of tapping into the cultural proclivities of the continent, where people are generally very expressive physically, they like to dance, and they are thinking of how you can translate that into new products and services. I met people who are even thinking about how you can legally capture dance so that you can protect it as a proper right. So we're going to see some new innovations in intellectual proper rights, in fact arising from these kinds of developments. But it's also taking place at a time when devices are starting to converge, you don't need to, I'm sure in your basements, you may have some old devices accumulating somewhere. With the advances in technology, you are starting to see basically mobile phones starting to function as computers, and computers starting to function as mobile phones. So essentially, people are moving towards having basically convergent technologies. So the image of a feature of Africa is going to be, in my view, one without desktops, because everything seems to be going mobile, and desktops, as we've known them, that you have a computer sitting somewhere, this is really going to disappear, and it will disappear very fast. The second area that I've been looking into is the growing interest among African universities particularly to want to link up with their counterparts in industrialized countries, tapping into services like the MIT OpenCourseWare. The development of applications, so already a couple of applications that have been developed by Kenyan small startup companies for Apple. So we envisaged that this is going to be essentially an area that we're going to see a lot of creativity. And then because of reduction in the cost of storage, Africa has this potential to move into, right, leapfrog into the so-called cloud computing. This is, I got a wonderful definition of cloud computing actually from the Buckman Center, which is you take everything that you've got, including your kitchen sink, and you throw it up. And if it rains, you are in luck. And if it starts to come down, you duck, and then you do it again until it actually works. And the government officials in East Africa are very excited about cloud computing partly because they see this as a potential of reducing the costs of extending internet infrastructure in the country. So we're going to see, this is an example where the continent can move straight into the new technologies. There are all sorts of debates, you know more about this issue at the center than I do. There are a lot of debates about privacy, about security and all that. But the interesting thing here is just the level of interest in moving to the frontiers rather than following in the paths of old technological practices. I just mentioned already the area of mobile education, which we've seen the pioneering work of the one laptop per child at MIT. This is Uruguay where now every kid has one of these laptops. I serve on the Board of Directors of OLPC and we've been very interesting to see the impact especially on getting countries before they adopt the laptops. Everybody's wondering why are they not adopting them. But people quickly realize the implications of these laptops for educational policies and they want to change the policies first before they can introduce the laptops. Rwanda is one of the leading African countries. This is at the airport in Rwanda, which is one of the few places you can get free access to Wi-Fi. So kids go out there and play around. We do have a very small market in the Vatican, which I don't expect that it will grow very much, but this was a colleague of ours from Brazil who committed himself to making sure that the Pope would receive one of these units. We've had the impact, one of the impacts of the laptop has been really forcing the creation of this new market of networks, of which about 14 million units were sold at the end of last year. And it's estimated that by the end of this year, probably 30 million units would have been sold growing much faster than regular desktops. And the other area which I'm looking at at the moment is the margins of this field that I'm referring to as mobile health. Essentially because a lot of the information associated with healthcare in the past was hardly integrated, stored in regular media. And now with advances in technology, a lot of this information is becoming available and it's going to change the way we do healthcare. Let me just give you a little example of this, which is an ultrasound unit. This is about 10 years ago. That unit cost about $20,000. And so for most developing countries, you will find these units only in a few hospitals in urban areas. You will find them in most of the rural hospitals. About five years ago, a company in Washington, Seattle, developed a ruggedized version initially for the US military, something you could throw your backpack and get it to the battlefield. I was trying to get this to Kenya because I thought this was a significant improvement over the previous design. And a friend of mine called me up and said, don't do it. Just wait. Next week, there will be a new device approved by FDA that's going to be much smaller. This is an Australian version of the same technology, essentially, totally miniaturized. You can plug it into the laptop. And before I could reach out to this company, two weeks later, another company in a university in St. Louis, University of Washington, St. Louis, announced that they had developed a version of it, which basically transmits the data from the image to a cell phone. So you can do this at home, essentially. And your doctor will look at the image. And if the doctor doesn't like the image, the doctor can ask you to actually do it. I did, by the way, give the feedback to these two guys, who are obviously electrical engineers. They are not doctors because if they were, this is not the place to look for pregnancy, certainly not. They have sent me another image, which is more appropriate for the occasion. My final point regarding the ability of the continent to take advantage of this infrastructure has to do with the way Africans are trained. One is they are hardly trained in engineering. And secondly, they are even less trained in electronic engineering. And if they are, it's not connected to existing practices and not the curriculum hasn't been adapted to reflect the demands of the industry at all. So what seems to be happening, which is a very interesting development, is telecoms ministries are now starting to create universities, but putting them under the minister of telecoms rather than having them operate under the minister of education. Because if they are under the minister of education, they will just produce the same old curriculum which trains people to go and look for jobs and trains them using the old curriculum, which is unrelated to what the industry actually needs. And the first country to do this was Egypt, which created the Nile University, which is embedded in the telecoms ministry, but supervised by the minister of education. The Ghana created what's called a Ghana telecoms university to do the same thing. And the critical issue here is that these universities have a close connection with the private sector. Therefore, the private sector can help to direct and guide the design of the curriculum through the ministry. And that information is then conveyed to the universities. In the case of Ghana, the chairman of the university is also the minister for telecoms. So his interest is to ensure that this university can train people that the industry actually needs. And as of December last year, Kenya created the multimedia university. Now in all these cases, there have been enormous conflicts between the telecom ministries and the ministries of higher education. Partly because the laws are very clear, they state that universities are created under the ministry of higher education, not under the ministry of telecoms. In the Kenyan case, the only way they could do it was after they were advised that they were not the first ones to do it. And secondly, that Malaysia, a country that they respect very much, had created a multimedia university which is embedded in the ministry of telecoms. So it's a large delegation of representatives from the two ministries who went to Malaysia, came back and created, they called it exactly what the Malaysians call it. They didn't want to depart from the term. So this is the multimedia university of Kenya, which is modeled along the multimedia university of Malaysia. Because usually nobody wants to basically break with the tradition here. I understand that Tanzania is also considering creating a similar university. So this could become a trend in Africa of a new generation of universities created under the line ministries, the technical ministries. I have been trying to do a similar thing. This was in the summer creating the Victoria Institute of Science and Technology. With the intent of doing exactly the same thing, but I wasn't going to wait for the government. This was launching it with the chief secretary and the minister of telecoms. And as you can see, the most difficult part here was really figuring out how to open the champagne bottle. Everything else, like constructing the facilities, was a lot easier. This is where the institute is located in the town of Kisum on the shores of Victoria. And I went there with two volunteers, one of them from the Milton Academy here to help start training people. The BBC has just been to this place to do a documentary which I think they will broadcast on the 22nd of this month. And they ask the students to actually produce something for them. So apparently the BBC will use something that has been produced by the students. It's co-located with the local universities so that students can, if they're bored in class, it's an accountancy school. If they're bored in class and they have an interesting idea, they just go across the corridor and they can talk to somebody in the institute to think about how to translate some idea into business. And the students have no shortage of excuses to leave the classroom. So we basically try to institutionalize the basis for the excuse if you're bored with your classes. You can just go across and discuss with somebody. The idea is for the institute to admit concepts rather than students. And then we work with the concepts to translate them into businesses. So our board of directors and associates are mostly business people. The chairman of the board of the institute is also the head of Kenya's largest commercial bank. And he has an interest because he's looking for young people he can lend money to. So we have kind of a convergent interest here. So I'm looking to a future and it's just in the conclusion where, let me see if this actually works. The other one didn't, this is, no, it won't work. I'm looking into a future where there's going to be a lot of debate on the continent, on adjusting the laws and policies to reflect these technological opportunities. And it's really going to be pushed very much by young people who are able to do something or interested in working on new ideas, the infrastructures in place, and then they find out that they just can't do it because of monopolies and other obstacles. I think the Winston is an attempt to use pigeons to kind of demolish the monopolies. This is a typical monopoly thing. And as you could see from the pigeons, they did it completely with the in-flight redundancy. It wasn't just one pigeon, they had several of them. They had rules, by the way, that no performance enhancing substances in the seed and no cuts allowed anywhere, no falcons to go after the pigeons. They had very clear rules about how to do it. So I think I'll stop here and you can throw your kitchen sinker to me if you want. So you're encouraging us to throw the kitchen sink. And I'm going to start by throwing some cold water. And I'll offer the context that obviously the subject that I'm passionate about as well have had the great fun of watching technological transformation on the continent over the last 15 years. But a couple of questions about whether the future is quite as rosy as we might hope from this. You mentioned that the SAT 3 cable, this is the cable that runs down the west coast of Africa. It was the first major fiber optic cable to connect the continent. Is that about 5% usage? Is that correct? 5% usage, in part because no one's been able to figure out pricing on it in such a way that makes it actually useful to most West African businesses. Once that 3 came into play, my business connectivity costs in Ghana fell by about 20%, not radically. What's going to prevent this next wave of cables from being priced as exploitatively? What makes us think that we've got it right this time? Has teams really driven down the price in East Africa? Can we expect that any of these are suddenly going to make bandwidth close to as affordable in an African context as it is in a US or European context? Yeah, the SAT 3 was based on the model that you have, the assumption is that you have very few users. So you make your money by charging very highly, but providing to a very small number of users. The older new cables are based on a different model, which is to try to extend it to a lot of users and therefore be able to drive down the price. None of that is going to happen unless you have competition, essentially. And as you can see, the possibility for monopoly here is going to be fairly limited because you have a lot of players coming in. South Africa, one company has already reduced the cost of broadband by 50%. And so I think over time we are going to see a reduction, essentially arising from the competition. I think the biggest limiting factor is going to be whether you have more users, and this is limited by access devices. The men of this country still have duty on imported computers. Kenya has a duty on refurbished computers. So actually, in the next few days, I'll be publishing an article on the BBC website calling for removal of all duties on access devices. If you have any access device that works, there should be no duty on it. Even if, say, if you can use your kitchen sink for doing it, there shouldn't be duty on your kitchen sink. And these are kind of left over from old policies. The reason why Kenya has apparently introduced duty on refurbished computers is the claim that they are going to move into assembly of computers. I think the whole idea of assembling computers is also a misguided one, because the devices are converging. It doesn't make sense anymore to start assembling these devices locally. In fact, we are going to get to a point where companies providing internet services would prefer to give the devices to you for free. This is already happening in the telephone industry. I think it's going to happen in the computing arena as well. So I think it's a qualitatively different scenario from when SART 3 was actually introduced. But unless those policies are in place, unless we start to get people pressuring governments to actually change the policies, dealing with the monopolies, I think, again, Winston is an example. It's a kind of caricature of what needs to be done, which is to force governments to recognize that they will make more money if businesses expand rather than if they basically try to tax existing infrastructure. Yes? Presentation on the internet. I saw it being done. How are you breaking what we do for that? My question is related. How do you see policy making in terms around the minister of culture, like view the hotspots? And now there is an increasing culture of land houses. So how do you see this affecting Africa? Because sometimes innovation comes from where you do not expect. Yeah, I think the country does have gone farthest in thinking about this. It's been Kenya, which introduced a law already. It's called a media bill that was adopted about a year ago, which's main purpose was to anticipate these technological developments. And has this includes the extension of fiber-optic cables to all headquarters of political constituencies in the country, which is about 210 of them. And so that wiring is already being done at the moment. The first step is actually to get the cable there. They're calling it the digital villages. The idea is that every village will have a connection. This is why I'm interested in the devices, because if you have the cable getting there, but you don't have the devices, the facilities of no use or no use to you. The Ministry of Telecoms announced about six months ago that it was going to import into the country about a million laptops. And anyway, had exactly the same old debate whether people can eat laptops. Like, should the money be used to provide people with clean water and those kinds of debates. And these debates are not going to go away. But at least in the Kenyan case, there is a very clear a policy framework. They have also gone as far as saying that they will provide free broadband access to universities, provided the universities digitize all the content that they have, all the material they have in their collection. I don't know of any other countries that have been anticipating this from a public policy perspective. Now the way Kenya did it was to try to amend an existing law, which was basically the law dealing with broadcasting. So it's got very controversial because the people interested in maintaining law and order tagged on to it a provision that allows the government to confiscate your equipment in case you are saying something they don't like. So this delayed there, actually the law got adopted but subsequently got revised to remove this offensive provisions. But the reason they used an existing law was they wanted to basically buy time. Now not all countries have anticipated and started wiring internally. When I was in Tanzania, the president gave an estimate of something like 40,000 basically miles of wiring that needs to be done within the country. And that hasn't been done yet. They're still working on it. The latest I heard, which is about a week ago was that the fiber optic cable that lands in Jerusalem, which is very close to the city, the largest internet provider which is twig.com is now using wireless to connect to the fiber optic cable. That's because that infrastructure is not in place at all. But the C-com cable has already made it to Rwanda as of last week I believe through Uganda. So there's a lot that's going on essentially to address this question of allowing for greater inclusion. I don't think that the monopolies are going to hold out for very long because there's enormous pressure coming from governments and the youth, particularly to actually get connected. Yes. I just follow on this theme of the digital divide and inclusion and so on. I'd be interested in your thinking about more of the two-step approach where there is so much focus on getting the end user, the public, individual connected and in places like Africa and other developing countries, this is a very, very daunting task as you well know. So it seems to me that more concentration on the people who serve the public as a first step and you're talking about these government sites being connected, having clinics and schools and so on, focusing on those locations, getting the infrastructure for rural health and so on. It's not so important that each individual be connected but rather the nurses and the clinics and that they can get tremendous amounts of help by being connected to disease information and the headquarters and their agency, the ministry of health and so on, education. Yeah, this is my view actually is that connecting to schools and health centers would be more important than connecting to other government departments or other connecting to post offices. These are all important but I'm saying as opposed to focusing on the individual, every single person has to have a device and a connection as the first overwhelming task but rather give some priority to these organizations that serve their needs, but particularly when you're dealing with low literacy and so on. Yeah, the reason I'm interested in the devices is because one, they are no longer $2,000 pieces of equipment, those models of centralizing in one place like a clinic or a center, IT center, was because the access devices were very expensive but when you start to get to $200 devices or less, $95 devices, no case launched its network booklet laptop I don't know how much it costs but my vision is that the need to centralize may not be as critical as it was 10, 15 years ago when the access devices were, computers were very expensive and I would like to see actually these devices being, the prices being brought down essentially and I think that's the trajectory that we're headed to. It's basically that cell phones are going to become more sophisticated and it's already a cell phone culture. I think to get people of Africans now off a cell phone culture and confine them to a kind of a desk somewhere is going to be a lot more difficult. I'm not thinking about, I'm thinking of people who have no access, no cell phone, not the people who are already using the technology not connected, but to reach those far distant. Yeah, I would deal with that under the principle of the extra mile essentially that infrastructure is going to, these services will start off with where there is infrastructure in the first place and then it will extend from there and I'm not, I have no expectation that there will be universal coverage in time soon. This has never happened, hasn't happened in the United States. We're still debating in the US about high speed internet access. It's going to take time. I think the key thing is as far as I'm concerned is how to take advantage of emerging technology so that these countries don't end up adopting technologies that are being abandoned by the rest of the world. And many of these emerging technologies are cheaper and more efficient and they build on a, they build on existing infrastructure. So I could see, for example, telecom companies in Africa playing a much bigger role in providing educational services than we've actually done in the past. Yes. I wish I shared your optimism about the fate of the monopolies in Africa. One of the things I worry about is that the kinds of research I've been reading about the submarine cable infrastructure you talked about seems to suggest that we're going to have a repeat of the earlier adoption problems with the first expensive cables. I recall there was a big proposal for mandating open access to submarine cables because of the large public involvement in funding some of them. Do you know where the status of that is or if that... This is like the word bank led. Yeah, yeah, there was a proposal I know that to mandate because of the public funds committed to mandate particularly in East Africa that the cables have an open access requirement because even if you get easy and the other one that's only two, right? For most of those sites, but now you only have one. Teams is going to operate on an open access policy. This is the one from... Did I just... Yeah, yeah, teams which is from Fujaira in the United Arab Emirates to Mombasa, the Kenyan policy is to do it on the basis of open access. So I don't think it's going to happen overnight but I think it's going to be extremely difficult to have the system maintain monopoly control when you have such massive redundancy in availability of bandwidth. Especially when Google kicks in in a year's time this is going to make it very difficult for existing operators to maintain a monopoly. The most areas where we see this monopoly is where you have government involvement. So a large part of it is also going to be driven by liberalization of the markets. So I think it's going to be different from SAT 3. SAT 3 I think was an aberration was isn't the standard for how the continent is going to function. Certainly cell phones, if you look at what's happened with cell phones I think that's the standard of how these systems are going to function, not SAT 3. SAT 3 was a departure from the way cell phones were actually being designed. Yes. I share your sense that the mobile phone is likely to be the platform of choice for the continent. Certainly we've all watched this transformation over the last 10 years and it really has been a very fundamental one. There are some downsides to having mobile phones be your cheap access device. Let me just toss out two of them really quickly. One is that as our friend Jonathan Zitrain likes to say this device plus the internet is very generative. It's very easy to create a brand new application, put it out there, people like it, they use it. On mobile phone networks, building something like Mpesa, this amazing money transfer system, really requires the phone company to buy into it to some large degree. So this suggests possibly a different pathway. Second thing, we know that these companies in many cases have very close relationships with the government. This leads to some really interesting questions about surveillance, civil liberties, things along those lines. We saw people sending text messages, promoting ethnic violence in the wake of elections in Kenya. Then we saw the government do something very interesting which was essentially requisition those records, identify 1100 people who'd sent those messages and that sends a really interesting and perhaps chilling message to people who want to use these devices, say to report on corruption. So how do we work around those constraints? How do we make sure that this ends up being generative and how do we make sure that this ends up being safe for a wide variety of businesses? I think the answer to that is diversity in approaches. And anybody who thinks they know how the continent is going to look like, including me, I'm crazy, totally crazy because it's really difficult to anticipate what is likely to happen when you have this level of infrastructure being made available. The other thing that I think is important is that this is coming and like SAP 3, this is happening after a phase of democratic movements on the continent. So you have a lot of groups, constituencies, I know quite a number of organizations that want to take advantage of this infrastructure to make a lot of information being made publicly available, make it, connecting it with the Google map, for example, to track movement of services, goods, basically enhancing transparency on the continent. I think we're going to see those kinds of uses that will basically limit how much the government can do and get away with. It's not going to prevent the governments from wanting to control it, they will just find other clever ways of doing it. But I do agree, I've been told by colleagues of mine in the Nigerian government who say that when the telecom system was liberalized, they lost the capacity to track down criminals because they could hardly now take, listen to them on the landline and were very interesting kind of downside of the liberalization. This is why I think doing it through a very clear public policy which kind of opens up space but allows for this proper management of the system to take place. In the case of Nigeria, they didn't do that. So the resistance to liberalization was coming from the police force. Because I'm sure that's the only problem with tracking down criminals in Nigeria. Yeah. Yeah. My intent was not to beat up in Nigeria. It was hanging out there. I had to take a strike at it. Yes. Women's organizations in Uganda trying to empower women in the Northern part of rural Uganda. And there they were very crazy in combining old media, community radio and mobile phones that were applied to the women in groups with very scarce internet access and really had some impressive results there even with rural illiterate women. So I was just wondering whether you have some reflections on old media combined with so-called new media rather than this sense of everything going towards convergence? Yeah. My first example was basically new media combining with old media. Winston, the pigeon, is old media. And so radio is going to come back on a big scale because of this convergence with podcasting. So we're going to see, I think, an expansion of the use of radio. And I believe that human beings were intended to be audio in the first place, not visual. And my proof is very simple. You can shut your eyes, but you can't shut your ears. So a lot of education is going to go mobile because of the audio part. And so I see a lot of, and this is especially for oral cultures that are historically oral, like African cultures, combining with old media, particularly radio is going to be a very powerful tool. I think I just heard on radio this morning a proposal that professors should basically put, make their lectures available on iPhones and iPods and then the students listen to them before they come to the classroom. So don't send your students your PowerPoint presentations because that's totally useless. Send them your podcast. And then when they show up in class, they can start discussing right away. There's actually an example of this in Ghana, the University of Education in Winneba, which is the only university I know of in Africa that has a large part of its curriculum for education delivered by radio. And so when the students go in, they get a radio receiver. And it's also the only university that I know of where students can take their classes in bed because in morning classes, you don't have to wake up. They just take their devices and listen to the lectures. So I think your point is a very powerful one. It's really tapping into existing technology and upgrading them. That's really what's likely to happen. Yes. Phone number phones and laptops. Are you also saying that $100 laptop may be redundant now? Not redundant. It has actually all these capabilities. The reason it doesn't use it is because of various laws in various countries. It has video camera, it has voice, the teachers can communicate audio to students. Actually some do that. So it has all these capabilities. The limiting factor has been the legal obstacles to being seen as moving into the telecoms arena. So that laptop is already, in fact, it's already convergent. I'm sure there must be engineers here who have figured it out. A lot of time went into figuring out how you cannot use it as a phone and the guy who was helping us to do exactly that was seen somewhere in Asia using it as a phone. It's the same guy we hired to help us prevent us from getting in trouble with the telecoms companies. It's technically you can use it as a phone. You can communicate anytime and talk to the teacher. That's the whole idea. The teacher can, it's a networking tool. So a teacher can type, work on it on one screen and because of the mesh network, everybody else gets connected. It has the same functionality for audio as well. But because of restrictions for it not becoming a competitor to the telephone companies, arrangements have been made where it's not live. The teacher can send a message, it gets saved on the device and the students can download it. But technically it can be made to be live. In which case it's basically cheap, zero cost, basically cell phone. By natural legal agreements, one we make of agreements that is applicable to all the one that to purchase. This is telecoms regulation in any given country. It's gonna have restriction on who can offer phone service and whether there's licensing associated with that and who gets a license to operate in what area. So this is basically, it's just getting into telecoms. That's the issue, yeah, Nancy. The champ wearing the Proto Bluetooth rubber band? How is Ethiopia? That's Ethiopia, okay, thank you, thank you. I got in trouble with the people from the Gambia. Yeah. For saying he was from Ethiopia. A question about how you managed to establish the Victoria Institute of Science and Technology. First of all, I take it that it's a private institute and not public or not government sponsored. But was it by the use of the word institute as opposed to university or college? Is that how you got past the ministry of higher ed? I actually haven't passed the ministry of higher ed. We set it up as a charitable trust and as a charitable trust, you get registered under the minister of lands. I have my lawyer here, Mahat, who knows all about this. So we had some good legal advice, which is that you do it through the minister of lands. And that's how we initially set it up. And then we said, now we want to offer some entrepreneurial training. And as soon as you mentioned the word training, then you have to deal with either of the ministries. But we're partnering with an existing university. Initially it was going to be in my house because I didn't want anybody interfering with it. And I told everybody that the chancellor of this institute was going to be my mother. This had a huge impact on a lot of people. Nobody wanted to venture there. Yes, exactly, exactly. And then I got, it was funded entirely by friends of mine. Actually, just asked friends of mine to make some contributions. We raised $22,000, bought some equipment, which hasn't made it there yet. And then we got this offer from an existing university to partner with them. And so by being a partner with an existing university, we don't have to call ourselves an institution of higher learning because we are basically allied with the university. So if there are any aspects of our operations that have to do with the minister of higher education, our partner university will take care of that. That just illustrates all the hoops that one has to go through to do anything that supports innovation. Yeah, there are serious barriers. And the only way to deal with those barriers, in my view, is to offer a demonstration that dramatizes the futility of existing laws. Like me going around telling everybody that I'm building an institution to train people in a multimedia technology, but I'm having it in my house because if I didn't do it under the protection of my own house, some bureaucrat somewhere is going to try to stop it. Then people start to say, wait a minute, we shouldn't be doing something like this. Similarly, you've seen our colleagues from South Africa doing it in an extremely dramatic way of just saying, let's show that the techniques used by Genghis Khan a long time ago can be applied today. Otherwise, the system does not learn unless you demonstrate clearly to them that their policies are hindering. It's not sufficient to just analyze and come up with written evidence. It has to be concrete, it has to be in their face. Yes. I'm curious, how does this story sort of gel with other wider trends in the area? I mean, you've given examples from Kenya and Tanzania and even South Africa, but I mean, in terms of East African integration, economic integration, some of these things, has this been a roadblock or has this been something that's facilitated East African economic integration and how does it connect with linguistic factors? I mean, I know that part of the East African community mechanisms stipulated Swahili as a lingua franca across the whole region, so how are all these things working in effect? Either together and in more areas, might they be sort of bumping up against and at odds with one another? We don't know, this was launched in July 23rd, so it's only three months old. So we really have no clue, but there are hints of what might happen. The Tanzanian president was very clear when he was launching it, that he sees this as a tool for regional integration, because one of the problems with regional integration has been agreeing on common standards, of which language is just a standard. And this tool offers or is inherently a common standard. Secondly, facilitating the flow of services and ideas across the various countries. The fact that the SICOM cable is already reached Rwanda. That's theoretically, you can now start to have greater communication between Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. So I think it's going to have an impact on helping to integrate the continent, getting people to agree on common standards. There's already a lot of discussion among the ministers of telecoms in the region on harmonizing their policies and practices, because they are now confined to using the same infrastructure. It's not like a railway where you can stop it at the border and change the gauge, so that when the train gets there, you have to lift it. And then of course you have to be paid to lift it. This makes it a lot more difficult to do that at every border. Is there anyone back there? Rob? There you go. I've got a optimistic view of it, and I wonder if which one is right. The optimistic view is that here's an outside entity that's going to be offering affordable bandwidth to anybody who wants it, who can contract with them. It's going to circumvent the bureaucrats, and it's going to break the monopolies there. The pessimistic view is that this is a very large company with 900 million in venture money behind them. They're going to bleed every last penny they can out of everybody, and regulators are not going to stop regulating and they'll restrict access to this where it's in their interests. Do you have any thoughts on this or where it's going to go? Yeah, my view is that there are three B networks. It's too bad I couldn't show the fantastic graphics of the best cartoons I have. Round or something like that. It's that this is not the last we've had of a mid-obit satellites. It is just the beginning. And so I wouldn't be surprised to see other companies launch similar satellites. I know the Japanese are thinking about it. So what's happening on land with the redundancy? I think we're going to see the same thing in satellite technology as well because the technologies are getting more efficient, cheaper to launch, cheaper to manage. The question is whether you'll have companies of the reach of Google. People are a little uneasy about Google. I'm actually going to have a word with them on some issues that I'm interested in in October. But I would not be surprised to see, say in the next five to 10 years, the Chinese network of a similar kind that is targeting the developing world. They wouldn't surprise me at all. It didn't surprise me that the head of Google China has just stepped down to create his own company. People in China don't step down to create their own companies of that scale if they don't have some close connection with the government. And China has always made it clear that it has always wanted to set its own standard, especially in telecommunication. So I can offer you a prediction that we're going to see competition with it or through B. So with that prediction, I think I have to ask you all to join me in thanking buses for a project. Can I ask you, please, do me a favor. 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