 Good afternoon everyone, and welcome everyone joining us for every York world. I'm Daniel Oyola, core program coordinator here at the Berkman Klein Center. And we're here to introduce our special guest this afternoon. Eric Osiakwon is an entrepreneur and investor with 15 years of ICT industry leadership across Africa and the world. He's worked in 32 African countries, setting up ISPs, ISPAs, IXPs, and high tech startups. Some of these companies and organizations include Angel Africa, Angel Fair Africa, Ghana Cyber City, Penn Plus Bites, Africa Elections Portal, FOSFA, WAPCO, GUSPA, FISBA, GNVC, Internet Research, and Hand Ghana Connect. And he serves on the boards of Farmer Line for Heteronga Solutions, Sequerys, Ampid, SameLogic, eCampus, VSAP, and Juan Jimfuz, the mouthful. Some of which are his own investments as well. I mean, he was part of the team that built the team's TAMS submarine cable in East Africa and an ICT consultant for the World Bank, Source Foundation's UNDP, USA, USDOJ, USDOS, as well as African governments and private firms. He authored the Kings of Africa Digital Economy, co-authored the Open Access Model, negotiating the net, the politics of internet diffusion in Africa, and the internet in Ghana with the Mosaic Group, who has invited us to contribute ideas to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair's Commission for Africa, Eric Sopoptek, Ted Stanford, and MIT fellow. And he was previously a fellow here at the Berkman Klein Center. So what do I offer to do? Take the floor. All right, thank you, Dan. And it's a pleasure and honor to be back here. The last time I gave a talk here was with E-10. And I think that was 2008, 2009, when we were doing this fellowship program on building internet infrastructure in Africa. And we had just finished building the team submarine cable in Kenya. So it's good to be back after many years. Just kind of give a little bit of update on what has been happening on the continent most importantly. But also to kind of zero in on the Kings of Africa, which is sort of the five countries that I've been investing in, watching, and I think these are the countries that are leading the digital economy in Africa. I currently run Shadow Capital, which is an early stage micro growth fund that primarily invest in the Kings countries. And we invest in technology companies that are essentially creating scale. We essentially write small checks, but most importantly also bring a lot of our experience and our skills to these entrepreneurs. We call that mental financing. So can I give you a little bit of a view on what has been happening on the continent? First, I would like to give up the slide. When I'm giving a talk on Africa, because it pulls African perspective that Africa is very huge. You can literally fit the US, China, Europe, France, and India into Africa. So Africa is very huge landmass, and that's very important for you to keep in mind. And I'll tell you why the Kings are very important in relation to this context. So what has been happening in Africa in the last 20 years is quite phenomenal. A lot of development economies thought that Africa should go the route where everywhere else in the world went, which is pretty much industrialization, right? So you move from a green economy to an industrial economy to a formation aid. Africa actually segue into the formation aid without necessarily industrializing it. So I'm one of those who believe that industrialization is important, but it's not essential. It's not essentially what you need to be able to get into a formation aid, that you can actually segue. And Africa has proven that with mobile. What's the idea? Billion mobile users on the continent, if you look at the numbers, in some cases, we currently, these are numbers from 2014. But if you look at these numbers today, we surprise the US and Europe and most parts of the world, including China. And so self-ownership has been a big part of Africa. And the second thing that happened, as mentioned, was the development of submarine cables. And these submarine cables brought broadband. And these submarine cables connected with the mobile networks to create what I call the mobile web. So Africa is mobile first. It's mobile only. And so there's no cable infrastructure. It's almost nonexistent to see cable infrastructure in Africa, which is part of the reason why mobile became the infrastructure that people went to. And with the availability of submarine cables, the web was being seen by most Africans through their mobile phones. And so Africa is the mobile first continent. And we begin to see this manifest in how people use Facebook, the growth of Facebook numbers. And the fact that that has also created a new phenomenon where Africa's millennials and big deal natives are beginning to create their own Facebook, right? They're going to believe that by learning how to write code, they can create solutions to problems that they see in their everyday life, and by that creating a next set of businesses. And this is the phenomenon that I really believe is going to make the greatest impact on Africa. Today, if you look at the impact numbers, mobile is contributing about 6% to Africa's GDP, which is higher than other parts of the world. And this is studied by NANMA GSMA. And so this impact you're seeing is the connectivity impact. So let me segment that for you. Between 1998 and 2008, Africa was mostly connecting to the rest of the world and pretty much consuming technology. POST that I've always seen now is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are building technology. So this generation is the creative era. And I really believe that that impact is going to be more than double or triple the kind of impact that we're seeing already. And that's what we really believe that Africa is going to be a very competitive part of the 21st century economy because of this innovation that we're seeing. Now, you may ask you, what are some of the evidence to support this? If you take the connectivity era, this is study that was done by Freshfields. What they did was they looked at 40 TMT companies, telecom media and technology companies in 18 stock markets in Africa. And over a decade, they realized that if the annulus return was 19%, in other words, if you invested a company like MTN, which was not existent in 1990, and you were trading the shares of MTN, over a decade, you made 19% return. You made more than three times what oil and gas made over that period. So even with the connectivity era, the industry created a lot of returns. So much that oil and gas is nowhere to compare. And the Africa MS index, which is 11%, cannot even compete. And this report is captured in Africa poised for a tech takeoff. And if you read that report in detail, what it really says that this was a connectivity era. So the creative era will create much more impact. And that's the takeoff that the world is going to be seeing. And this is foiled by an emerging middle class. If you look at this map, very interesting. This was stated by McKenzie. And I want to give them all the credit. So you see here that, yes, the rich gap is going up. But most importantly, you see the poor gap is closing. What is happening is that more and more people are entering into the middle class, leveraging technology. And this is what is foiling the adoption and the growth that we're seeing. McKenzie projected that in the next 10 years, we're going to see a phenomenal leap in Africa, which is that if you take internet penetration, it's going to grow by 50%. If you take internet users, it's going to hit almost more than half a billion. And e-commerce is going to be about $300 billion in e-commerce transactions. So this is going to be foiled by the creativity era. And so I think that these creative entrepreneurs are coming out of this network of incubators and accelerators that you see around the continent. These are the innovation hotspots. Today, probably this number is doubled already since this workforce are produced. So there's quite a lot happening on the continent in terms of entrepreneurs creating technology and live rocking. And what we're really seeing is the mobile web platform becoming the platform for disruption, where it's disrupting climate, agriculture, so existing markets. Existing markets have been disrupted to a very large extent by the mobile phenomenon. So if you take mobile money, one of the challenges in Africa was the adoption of cards, which is quite normal here in the US and in Europe. But in Africa, it was hard to do that. But mobile is done that. Now, most people keep their money electronically on their phone through mobile money. And that is for the whole new online economy where now Africa actually leads the world in fintech innovation because of these incredible developments. And we begin to see this from the younger generation of Africans who before my time, in my time, if you went to college, you had two options, get a job after school or get out of the country. Today, you have entrepreneurs who are saying, no, I can actually create a business in Africa. One of the companies that backed very interesting stories, a guy called Kelding. This guy's first startup failed. So when his school in Ghana finished and started his first company that didn't work, and he had an opportunity to come to the US, you would have expected that, OK, his company failed, he came to the US, just find something to do and stay here. He actually lives here. He came here and interned at the laundry for nine months, basically learning the skills of the laundry business because his next startup, he wanted to disrupt the laundry industry. And when he finished, he went back to Africa and started a company called FORE, F-O-R-H-E-Y.com, which is basically an Uber for laundry. So the same way you order laundry, he's built an app where you can, the same way you order Uber, you can order another laundry. I mean, this guy's story, I say it all because it's quite phenomenal in a lot of ways because he could have stayed here, his uncle is here, he had family here, right? But he realized that I had better opportunity in Africa to create a business. And so he went back and started his company, and when he told me the story, I didn't have a choice then to be part of it, right? Now, you're going to see this in a lot of younger generation Africans who are really taking their destiny to their homes. And they are the ones creating and building these companies that we're talking about. And we find them in the King's countries. The King's countries are the five countries that, as I said, I believe are leading the digital economy, which is Kenya, Ivy Coast, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. And you ask me, how did I come by the King's? So I built a criteria. The criteria essentially has five main components. I'll go through them very quickly because I want to open this up to questions very quickly. So economic growth is one, a very telecom sector, tech infrastructure, entrepreneurial ecosystem, and pro-innovation policy. I've actually written a chapter on this. So if you Google the Kings of Africa with my name, you'll see the holes, which I'm writing into a book eventually. It's going to be a book on investment in Africa. And here are some numbers on the King's countries. Again, if you Google, you can see these numbers. And I kind of came up with some uniqueness of the Kings, which represent to a very large extent the elements that an entrepreneur needs. So I say the Kenyans are smooth. The Kenyans smoothness. The Ivorian persistence, the Nigerian hustle. I want Nigerian friends can hustle anywhere, the Ghanaian integrity, and the South African diversity. These are the five characteristics that I believe are very, very important for any entrepreneur to succeed. And it's seen in the King's countries. So the question you probably might have said, so how did this digital wave start? Italy started in South Africa in 1995, when a gentleman called Mark Shatowal built a company called Twart, and sold it to Versailles in 1999 for more than half a billion dollars. And on the same time, Vodafone, Vodafone's South African company, Vodacom, started peeping at time. And that became the foundation for mobile money later on. I went to Ghana in 2001, and went together with Mac Davies. We built busy internet. And I started the Ghana New Ventures Competition, where we started training Ghanaian entrepreneurs on how to build businesses. And this was in 2001. And currently, the wave is in Kenya. Today, I have a scene as the quite essential innovation have, and we've seen a lot of innovation, like M-Perser, Brick. I can go on and on from Kenya. And I think it's going to move next to Nigeria, and then eventually to Ivory Coast, which is sort of the five King's countries, to a very large extent. So let me kind of last two slides on what the King's represents, right? So if you look at it, Kenya is really representing East Africa as an essential market or an entry into the East African region. And Ivory Coast really represents the Francophone bloc in Africa. Africa is not only Anglophone, it's a Francophone, and it's also Lusophone, very important. And if you take the ING in the middle, which is this is the most interesting part. So Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Ghana is almost the population of the United States, with 300 million people, but sits on one fifth the land mass of the United States. Remember the map of Africa that was so huge that it could fit the United States into it. So these three West African countries are the most closely needs market, right? And so in terms of investment, these markets will represent a very important market if you are going to look at Africa as an investment destination. So I call them the Dutch Bank. You know, ING is the Dutch Bank. So that is the Bank in Africa. South Africa represents South Africa, where it all began. And I really believe that we're beginning to see a lot of Zibrakons, a credit called Zibrakons, not Unicons, coming out of Africa. This is the billion dollar valuation companies. And we're going to see more of them in the 21st century. I believe the biggest tech company in the world is going to come from Africa, and most likely from the Kings. So I went with a little bit of my track record. It's pretty much all of this is online. But the most important thing I want you to notice here is that I'm kind of a pioneer in a lot of ways. In terms of the ISP revolution, building a lot of ISPs and IXPs and ISPAs, and then build some marine cables, helping start a lot of the incubation centers, and starting Angel for Africa, which is an event that I started in 2013 that essentially brings entrepreneurs and investors together, where the entrepreneur speech and investors write checks. We've had 15 deals so far in the four deals, events that we've done, totaling about $30 million. This year, we're taking an event to Ivory Coast. This is the last Kings country that we're going to. It's in November. And I invite you to come if you want to have an experience of these entrepreneurs. Myself, I've invested in about 10 startups in the Kings countries, plus I've invested in Senegal, Cameroon, and Benin. And as I said, I've just set up Sanzo Capital as a fund that is essentially seeding these entrepreneurs and creating the skill that is needed. So that's about it. That's my background. Sorry, this is my contacts. You have my background, most of this online. So I think I'll open it up now and take some questions. I know we have some people online. So I'm happy to take questions, both in the room and online. How much more time do we have then? OK, we have about 30 minutes, so let's open it up now. Yeah, I've got a question just from what you've seen on the continent about a certain issue. When I go back to Nigeria, one thing that really not frustrates me, but really makes me think where there's really room for growth, is in GPS technology. I know that there's a lot of streets where I mean, there's the roads, someone just rode out there, and it really wouldn't work. Sometimes the numbers are just what people put outside there and how it's a business centralized system. I think it'd be really hard to implement that kind of technology. But I think if someone would do the work to actually track down and label all of this, the infrastructures and plates fit, Uber and all these delivery services to come in. And I was wondering, from what you've seen on the continent, is there any movement on that end? And which countries are really leading the way if there's anyone who really has good integrated GPS? Very good question. So as you know, necessity is a matter of invention. And that's what we're beginning to see. At least no three entrepreneurs who are looking at this problem. Well, in general, I think it's important that there's a proper name in infrastructure which is the responsibility of government. And if you think set of markets, like Nigeria has a very strong good addressing system. And I think Nigeria has a good addressing system, partly because Nigeria didn't have a postal system. In Ghana, we had a postal system. So you go to the post office and pick up the mail. And I think it was part of the reason why the addressing system was there, but it wasn't used. But in Nigeria, you didn't have a postal system. So you had to go pick up the mail how to come to you. Then the other markets were, pretty much, the addressing system is non-existent. But there's a startup, for example, in Ghana called SNU Code, who are trying to build a system where you are able to use target and GPS coordinates as a way to locate places and people and be able to then get access. In Ethiopia, I made a startup. I can't remember the name right now. But what they did was sort of zone Ethiopia down and demarcate it, and then give them tags, which essentially allows you to be able to figure out things that are happening and places in Ethiopia. I know a lot of entrepreneurs that are trying to address this in South Africa and other places. So I think that, as you rightly said, getting an addressing system right is a very fundamental need. And I think that we're very likely to send all the entrepreneurs who are trying to address this to think it's in the remit of government to be able to make sure there's a proper addressing system in place and infrastructure is there, which is why we really think that a government-created and nebulant environment is very important for private entrepreneurs to then sort of innovate on the back of that. But as it is, entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs, right? If there's no addressing system, they'll find a way to create one. And that's what we begin to see. I have a question in terms of projections for Francophone and Lucophone countries, economically speaking. How do you see their development coming about in the next 30 or so years? As you mentioned, as we know, the Anglophone in Nigeria and Kenya, those are the ones that are in the forefront. And I'm just curious to how you see that playing out in your future. Right. That's a very good question. So actually, if you take Africa, if you look at Africa very critically, half of Africa is Francophone and Lucophone. The other half is Anglophone. But because of the language divide, unfortunately, we don't pay attention to that. So we have very little data on the Francophone countries. Actually, in West Africa, there are only four countries that are Anglophone, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, and Gambia, all the rest are Francophone countries. And then Central Africa to villages, all Francophone. And then you really get the Anglophone blog from East Africa growing down south. So that represents a very strong economy. If you take Ivory Coast, for example, this year Ivory Coast is projected to be the fastest growing economy at 8.4%. And these are the world bank and IMF figures. Ghana is going to bounce back at 7.2%. If you look at the Francophone bloc, for example, they have a common union among the Francophone countries. So they all use the CFA, which is taxed to the French currency. And so it's a very strong currency. The CFA is pretty strong. Ivory Coast has a regional base that, basically, you can trade among the Francophone countries. So the Francophone economies are very strong. And I personally made an effort to start looking to the Francophone markets, because these are very strong economies, right? And you cannot say you're in Africa without paying attention to the Francophone bloc. But also, the divide is also, like you said, it's a language divide, right? Fortunately for us, I mean, if there's something that I regret, like when we were in school, you had French classes from primary school. We just didn't take it seriously, right? So and in the Francophone countries, they have Anglophone classes from primary school. And I think, on average, probably they took it much more serious than we do. So I think that's where the divide is from, because if you can't speak a language, then you're less interested, you kind of communicate, et cetera. So one of my views is that Anglophone countries need to take the Francophone bloc much more seriously, because I think in the long term, you know, economic development is all about trading among ourselves. The best way, the way that Africa is going to develop is when we trade among ourselves. And so it's an interest to know each other's language. It's our interest to start trading among ourselves. Of course, we need to trade with the world. The world is global. But the reality is that, I'll give you an example. Recently, I was paying attention a little bit to the timber industry. And I realized that a lot of the timber processing companies in South Africa used to import their timber from outside the continent. Meanwhile, there are a lot of countries that have timber, like Kenya, produce a lot of timber. And in the most recent parts, they are importing a lot of the raw materials from Kenya, which is totally increased the trade between Kenya and South Africa, that it's in the billions. It's so significant now. So I think one of the things that is important is just the fact that if we start trading among ourselves, you realize that a lot of the raw materials you need for selling industry and selling parts of the continent can be found in other parts of the continent. So you don't need to get it from outside. One, two, you can access a common market. And part of the common market development is in these sub-regional blocks that we see, Equals for West Africa. We have the EAC, the East African Community for East Africa. We have the SADIC, which is the Southern African Development Corporation for the Southern Bloc. And of course, there's the North African Bloc. Fortunately, the North African Bloc aligns itself more to the Middle East. But I think they're still part of Africa. So I mean, on top of that is, of course, the African Union that is really, really trying to create this integrated Africa. The recent developments on that is that the African Union is going to be issuing a common passport for our Africans. First of all, I mean, if you cannot travel to another African country, then you're pretty much stuck, right? I mean, some of the interesting developments of history is that, look, if you have an American passport, it's easy for you to enter an African country. Then me, another African, I have an African passport, which in some sense doesn't make sense. But that is the genesis of the problem, right? If you cannot move into one country, then you kind of do trade there. Last year, the African Union, I think, did the most interesting thing, pass a resolution at the annual meeting where you're basically encouraging member countries to issue visas to other Africans on arrival. And certain countries are adopting it, Ghana adopted it. So now, if you're an African, you show up in Ghana, you get a 30-day entry visa without applying, going to the embassy. And I think that's a very good development that we can at least move within Africa. Part of the reason I first went to Kenya, which is a very personal story, was that I got an opportunity to go to Kenya on a very short notice. Within three days, I had to be in Kenya. And the reason I could make it was, Ghana needed a visa to go to Kenya. Actually, Kenya's president, Kenyatta, and Ghana's founding president, Kuma, did a deal, did a bilateral deal. So the Kenyatta don't need a visa to come to Ghana, and I didn't need a visa to go to Kenya. So I only bought a ticket and I was in Kenya within two days. And I'm sure if that was not the case, would have taken me another two weeks or a month to get a visa, and probably that opportunity would have slipped by. So to a very large extent, I think that the problem is being solved, but we need to move faster. I think that having an integrated economy is very, very important in a lot of ways. The last fact on this is that if you look at the intra-Africa trade numbers, actually, Esen Young has done some study on this. It's really growing in terms of Africa's trading among ourselves. So that's encouraging that we're beginning to see those numbers growing. And I think that over time, with technology, it's gonna really help, right? Technology creates a lot of interoperability. And I think that as we see more of this entrepreneurs, and part of this is also our fun thesis. This is why we believe in originalization or creating scale. Because we invest in companies that we can take into multiple markets. And so at an early stage, we are trying to get entrepreneurs to think Africa, not think Nigeria, not think Ghana, not think Kenya, but think Africa. And as you begin to create that, you begin to create a foundation for intra-African trade. You begin to build the next generation of entrepreneurs to think about changing Africa, to think about conquering the world. And it's not just thinking about doing, because you have a business in these countries, you effectively see them as part of your economy, right? And today, we know companies are economies. If you take Google, it's an economy on its own. If you take Facebook, it's begun on a lot of economies in the world, right? So I really believe that the entrepreneur that we're seeing today in Africa are going to be able to help us to mount these challenges by creating multinational businesses. Yeah. In your whole presentation, and thank you very much. It's really interesting. I just wondered, how do you see politics affecting innovation in the next entrepreneurs? Because as we know, like the World Bank is always ranking some of those key countries as having a very low index when it comes to ease of doing business, because for almost every compliance issue, you have to facilitate the government officials. And then the other worry is that in most of these countries, when there's a change in government, sometimes it sort of changes everything in that country, the whole innovation policy. And so how do you factor that in when you're talking about investing in Africa? So very good question again. So I think this is changing and it's changing very fast. So first is if you take on the public policy side, you begin to see a new development where public policy is being done on the regional level. So for example, if you take the EAC block, certain policies are very common among the EAC countries. If you take ECOA, certain policies are very common. And they're adapting this across the multiple markets. So for example, if you take ICT policy, pretty much I think in West Africa, the policy frameworks are very, very common. And it affects regulatory policy. And you begin to see that for example, in East Africa, today my number, my suffocating number works in Rwanda, I don't really get another number because the operators decide to follow policy where they basically accept the numbers. So the same phone number I have, it shows up in Uganda, it works. It charges the same fee before it was in the case. You couldn't even use your phone in Uganda, you had to get a new number and you were charged. If you're roaming, the roaming charges are higher than the countries from which you are. So it is changing, I agree that it needs to change faster. So generally we all know that public policy takes, it's a bit of a bureaucratic, so it takes time for things to change. What is important, I think that the very interesting development is the fact that some of these countries, especially the Keyings, are beginning to realize that innovation is leading the way and they're trying to stay out of the way when there's innovation. So if you take Empesa for example, I'm sure that somebody at a central bank in Kenya decided to allow that innovation to happen. And that's why today we have mobile money. If somebody, if that person had decided to, applied the law to the book, I'm sure they would have stopped Empesa from happening. So I think that there's a nice room where at a certain level, you want public policy to be relaxed so that innovation can lead the way. However, you also, at certain instances, want the legal framework to be strong so that there are no abuses. So for example, you can be financing terrorism through mobile money. People can be using that as a way to finance terrorism, money laundering, et cetera. Recently I was in Kenya and normally I have a bank account that I'm able to transact through my mobile money account. So I went to the bank and I wanted to do a little transaction and they said, we need to see your passport. And we wanted to see the ask me certain questions. And I was kind of in a hurry but on one thought, I realized that I needed to slow down and respond to the teller. And after the transaction, she said, the reason we are doing this is that we noticed that terrorism is being financed using mobile money. So now we're getting certain regulations from the central bank that we need to know the customers. We need to know why you are moving the money, what you're going to use it for. And so that's the reason we're slowing you down. And it makes sense to me. So in this case, you need some level of a legal framework to make sure that it's not abused. The question really is, when do you lacks regulation or policy to allow innovation to thrive? And when do you take a stand to avoid abuses? And I think these are instances where it's a question of, it is a case by case element where the regulator or somebody in power then has the discretion to make the call. But I think that, in general, our governments are really waking up to this reality. And part of it is also that the impact we are seeing. And secondly, I mean, most governments are today faced by the challenge of jobs. And the way you create jobs is by creating businesses. So somehow, there's a clear link and sent in by government to allow more innovation to thrive and more entrepreneurs to build business because by doing that, they create jobs. Hey, come on, Tyree, come here. So sit here for you. You can come here. You can't hear me. My body ties. This guy is one of the entrepreneurs changing in Africa. He has a company. I'll give you a chance to respond at some point. But come on and join us. Hi, everybody. Can I go to the back? Yeah. Yes. It's interesting in your comments about the mobile economy. Everyone has one of these. But it needs power to make it work. You know, what's the story on that side? Certainly, it's not as developed as it should be. You're absolutely right. So I think, again, necessity is the matter of invention. We begin to see also a lot of renewable energy innovations. Actually, one of the companies that just raised a significant amount of money is a company called UpGrid Solar, an M-Corpor Solar. I think one of them raised $19 million in 2015. The other one raised about $22 million or something like that. And this is actually, as a result of this, entrepreneurs building very interesting companies that are producing power of the grid. So I think that we're going to see the emergence of Mini and MicroGrid in Africa. We are also, to a very large extent, going to see the development of other forms of energy, especially in the recycling and renewable space. I know a couple of entrepreneurs who are doing very interesting things with recycling, renewables, and we can go on and on and on. And I think what we are beginning to see is that there's some kind of convergence between those entrepreneurs and the mobile entrepreneurs. So I'll give you an example. What M-Corpor does is they've just done a new, the latest platform allows you to now use mobile money to access energy, solar power. So if you are on the upgrade on the system, the way you pay for your solar energy is by having airtime on your phone. So when you have airtime on your phone, you make a payment, you get power. When your unit runs out, you don't need to go to a metering, you have to go to an agent to get airtime. From your mobile money, you're able to pay. If you pay, you get energy. So I think that this convergence is going to create new forms and ways in which energy is delivered. On the infrastructure side, what we are beginning to see is, for example, the mobile operators are beginning to get into towers that are solar powered. So you go to a village where there's no power. And you basically put out a mast. And that mast, on top of it, is solar panels. And those solar panels basically power the mast. And in some cases, it has enough power to now produce a gift to the village. So most people now begin to create charging units, clothes. And so in a village where there's no power, the mobile tower provides connectivity and provides power. So I think that we're going to see more and more of these innovations. Again, this is a case where you're going to see the West landing a lot from the Global South. It's a very light sense. The phenomenon you describe is because Africa has mobile. So some of the innovations you see in mobile is coming from Africa. And I think that on the energy side, we're going to see that as well. We're going to see some really interesting developments around energy, energy sources, how people use energy, how people consume energy. Because there's a lot of need there. And there's a lot of entrepreneurs tackling some of these challenges. So with the information age, you see a lot of GDP growth. But you don't necessarily see a commensurate growth in jobs and employment. So how do you make sure that everyone can benefit from this economy, at least in the countries where it's really taking off? Great question. So I was involved in a World Bank study that was done about three, five, seven years ago. And essentially, we try to look at what is the impact of mobile on GDP, which has sort of resulted in the GSMA study that we did. And one of the outcomes we had, I mean, the main outcome was that I may be wrong with these numbers. But it's something around for every 10% mobile penetration, it connects to, I think, its 1.38% GDP growth in the developed world and 3.2% in the developing world. Which sort of shows that mobile had more impact in the developing world than the developed world. The second thing we wanted to do was we wanted to see whether there was a causality between the two of them. In other words, was the mobile growth affecting the GDP or was the GDP affecting the mobile growth? That's very hard to establish, right? Because it's almost like a two-sided sword. Because mobile growth will impact GDP. And if people have more discipline here, they will buy mobile. But the fact that it was, I mean, we could establish that in the developing countries, it had more impact, was quite significant. To a very large extent, I think that we are going to see a little bit more of the causality now that we're seeing the creative economy begin to emerge. Because the simple reason, in my view, and I may be wrong, is that we are now beginning to see some form of innovation that comes from the participatory economy as opposed to the consumption economy, where people are just using technology. So you will say, probably, if you build a mobile network in Africa, because all the components of mobile are not built in Africa, you're creating more jobs here in the north where the production is than in the south where the consumption is. And that's why I think that the impact is going to be much more higher. And I think that the research institutions have a tax to start telling us what those numbers look like and what the causality is. And how much more, I mean, if I was a government, that's one of the things I would like to do. I'd like my research guys to say, OK, we want to create 10 jobs. How many companies should we empower? So if you can be able to establish that, then you can begin to look at the numbers in more relative times. But I think that's an exercise that needs to be done and will help a lot more in being more specific. Yeah, you have a question regarding this new generation of entrepreneurs that are being trained or developing in these countries. How does it look like the education ecosystem or the learning ecosystem for them? What can they learn about that? Where they can connect? How does it look like? So the two things. So in the criteria that we looked at in the case, we talked about an entrepreneurial ecosystem. And the ecosystem constitutes of government, private secretary, research, and academia. I mean, you don't have strong institutions that are training entrepreneurs, giving them the right skillset. So that's very important. But what we are beginning to see is a lot of the entrepreneurs are self-taught people. And I'll let Bobby Tyre respond a little bit and give you his own experience. I mean, some of the entrepreneurs that I have seen, I myself am a product of that. So I've got some basic education. But a lot of what I've learned is by being on the internet and being self-taught. So the internet is empowering in that sense. Tyre, what has been your experience as an entrepreneur? Have you learned everything from school or was it something you learned on the job? OK, well, it's a combination of both. So I have the rare opportunity of getting an MBA from MIT, which has a strong entrepreneurship culture. But before then, I'd been at heart from exponential entrepreneurship in Nigeria. So I might not be the perfect example of a homegrown, fully full homegrown entrepreneur. But what's happened on the continent now also is with folks like myself going to start companies, I've had quite a number of employees who also wanted to do their own startups. But they worked with me for a couple of months, learned a couple of lessons, and then went on to start businesses. They may also look at companies like Rocket, the Rocket Internet Group, for example. They own all kinds of internet companies like Jumi and the rest of them. The trend that we've seen is that Africans, smart young bright Africans, work for these companies for a little bit, six months, one year, two years. And then they go on to find their own companies. And then what we've also seen in addition is people like Eric, who are bringing in risk capital, are also creating vehicles like accelerators and incubators and mentorship programs that bring in young smart guys who might have capabilities, either technical capabilities or just have a dream. And then they come through programs where they're exposed to people like Eric, and then they learn the process of building a business. So it's a combination of a lot of things, incubators, start-up accelerators, working with founders or working with European finance start-ups that are serving as some kind of breeding ground for entrepreneurs and customers. Any more questions? Eric, so if you can take us back in time to 2001, and let's pretend that you're going to do this all over again. Can you walk us through what you think? If you had to give yourself advice, going back to 2001, to do this again, what would you tell yourself? So with the benefit of hindsight, we can always do things a little bit better. But what I've always believed in life is that there's no perfect condition. So one of the things my parents taught me, which I think is really helping in life, is that there's not like a perfect time and a perfect condition where things happen. But when you have a vision on objective, you try to create the environment for yourself. So as I say, the best way to predict the future is to create it. And I'm not going to give myself too much credit, but if you take people like Tayo, these entrepreneurs don't have any mentors, they don't have any road models. We're all trying to figure it from just falling our nose, so to speak. And being very, very ambitious and very, very committed and going through very tough conditions to build and to create an industry. And I think if you go back and look at other innovation hotspots around the world, if you take Silicon Valley, if you take even here, I mean, it was a generation that said, this is one to create this world. And that generation essentially sacrificed and took risks and did things that were not normal. And created an environment where institutions like MIT and Stanford were built and became the background for all the entrepreneurism and innovation you see here. And I think that in some sense, we are kind of creating that, which is why I always tell people, I mean, we've just been doing this for less than 20 years. I mean, Silicon Valley was built for more than 50 years. I mean, what you're seeing here today is many years. American democracy is 200 plus years. Africa is just starting. So I'm not saying that's an excuse to just be doing anything, but I think that when you put it in context, some things just take time. And so it's important to have that context in your mind. If you ask me, I don't think that I would change many things. Oh, there's only one regret I have, which I shall take in my French classes very serious. I really think that if I take it French seriously, I struggle to speak French. When I go to Francophone countries, I'm going to Alias France to the class again. That's one thing that definitely I would like to do properly. I would like not to skip my French classes and come up with excuses why I didn't take it seriously. I really think I should have taken it French seriously. But otherwise, I think I just took the opportunity that came to me. And you'll never have a preferred opportunity. What I didn't really tell you and I really connected was, he and I met at a conference, well, I did for a conference in Ghana in 2014, in 2015. And he wasn't going to pitch. This was the story. So there was a conference before our event called Africa Technology Summit. And he was there. So we met and we're talking. And he told me what he was doing. And I immediately said, this guy is going to be one of the best entrepreneurs because he was solving logistics problems. He was basically building a company and that would be delivering stuff. And I know logistics is a big problem in Africa. So it made a lot of respect for him taking on that challenge because it's a big challenge in Africa. And if he can fix it, it will. So I actually gave him a chance to pitch at our event, literally within a day or two. We agreed he decided to change his fight and stay. And I gave him a chance to pitch. And I'm sure he will tell you his experience and what happened. But we've all followed our nose and, in some cases, definitively jumped into things. And we're trying to figure it out. So there's really no manuscript or probably we are adapting some what is here in some way to Africa. Question from there. Let's take some questions from the internet. OK. What are your thoughts? So I think there's a huge future. So 70% of Africa's workforce is agrarian. So agriculture is the backbone of most African economies. I sit on the board of a company called Farmer Line. And the reason I mentor this entrepreneur, Aloshios, and a great team in Manuela died two co-founders is that I thought they were doing something that was, like, title, quite incredible to start looking at how mobile technology can help farmers get better outcomes. And this part of the disruption I'm talking about, that really what we are beginning to see is the use of mobile as what I call software infrastructure, as infrastructure to do things that were not there. The thing that you take for granted in America, like literally you wake up, even in your sleep, you can know what the weather is going to be today, right? Because there's so many sources of telling the weather. In Africa, farmers don't even get that information. You think it's weird, right? But what Farmer Line started doing was providing weather information to farmers. So farmers who actually know that it's going to rain a lot this season or it's going to rain less and so know what to plant and when to plant. Very simple things like that. And the second thing we started doing at Farmer Line was providing information services to farmers. So farmers can communicate among themselves and get access to market. So the farmer knows that a cheap of YAM costs $1 on the market and not $0.20, which the middleman comes to buy from him in the village and makes $0.80. But he did very little work. So now the farmer has better outcomes on their yield because now they know the market price. They can negotiate better with the middleman, right? The third thing that Farmer Line is doing now is we now created a system on Kiva where we're beginning to give loans to farmers because we realize that most of the farmers are subsistence small farmers, right? But they do very well with our information services. So imagine now the person can do two acres, three acres. But they need a loan to be able to do that. So we now created a loan scheme for farmers. So suddenly, this farmer in the rural area, who before couldn't take care of his family on his farming, now has access to mobile, has access to information, has access to communication. So they can increase their yield. They can increase their incomes. And now they can expand their farm. That's what I believe is economic development. Because you're not helping the farmer in the village to now be able to get better incomes. They can take their kids to better schools. They can provide better health care for their families. They can take care of their families better. Maybe this is not development. I don't know what it is. OK, so I think we can take one more question. And we've got to wrap up. Anyone from online? Anything from online? No more. OK, can I take this? Jeremy wasn't spoken, but really typing a lot. Yeah, thank you so much. It was extremely interesting talk. I wanted to ask, where else do you see a potential in the coming decades for innovation that would come from the mix of the creative culture and the lack of the old infrastructure? Because what I really liked about your talk is highlighting the fact that when you don't have some type of old infrastructure, that actually might not necessarily be a problem, but actually a possibility. And we saw that in Eastern Europe, where I come from, where currently mobile banking, GSM, mobile internet, is much faster, much cheaper, much better than the West. Mostly because when it started, we didn't have any of that. So we sort of build a new infrastructure from the beginning. And so you mentioned energy. You mentioned the submarine cable. But I was wondering, where else you see a possibility of some good innovation coming out of that? Good. So what you said, and I wanted to say that this is not just Africa. You're seeing this in Eastern Europe. You're seeing it in Latin America. So the Global South, generally, is, I believe, and I'm going to make my concluding remarks, I believe that the Global South is going to lead the Global North in the 21st century. And the reason is the fact that the Global South seems to have adopted new technology faster than the Global North. And the Global North has a challenge with legacy, because you have all technology that you have to build upon. So somehow our disadvantage has become our advantage. And to a very large extent, it also means that the Global South could be doing certain things more interesting and better than the Global North, because we don't have a legacy that we have to deal with. So we're going straight into next-generation technology, next-generation thinking, and we are going to be innovating in ways that will be hard for the Global North to do, just because of context. And that's why I really believe that you're going to see some of the greatest technology companies or innovations from the Global South. And which is why I think the Keynes countries are going to be very important in the 21st century. If you take Asia, Asia has the ticks. So it's Taiwan, India, China, and South Korea. And that's why I came out with the African Kings. So to conclude, my bet is on the fact that the Global North, even if you look at the flow of capital, it's being to really change the introduction of now Bitcoin and all this stuff. The flow of capital is really changing around the world. So I'm a big believer in the fact that we're going to see very, very interesting and innovative ways in which technologies apply to the way people live. People do things that will be a lot for the Global North to learn from. And it's something bad about it. I think the Global North will learn some things. And the cycle will go around again. Because don't forget, it will come at a time where what we have done will become legacy as well. And it will go around. So what kind of goals and shapes, right? So really, there's nothing new under the sun. We've just seen another emergence. And I think the South has an advantage in that sense.