Smartphone in Africa
Look in the App store or the Android market you will find a high percentage of games and fun apps. In Africa, the story is different. Africans are gradually waking up to technology and the focus is problem solving. While the Internet usage is growing in Africa, mobile phone usage is even growing faster. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), “Mobile phone subscriptions in Africa are growing at a rate of about 50 percent per year in recent years, faster than that of any other continent”. A 2009 ITU report found 28 percent of people in Africa have a mobile phone subscription, while only 5 percent of people there use the Internet. Therefore is no surprise that African are starting to adopt the medium to solve their daily life problems.
In Kenya, for example, Amos Gichamba who grew up watching cow farmers getting exploited because of lack of information on the market price of milk created a “text message-based system” that lets farmers send questions to a computer, match up farmers’ queries with a database of information about local dairy markets and send back answers in 140 characters or less.
Jessica Colaco is another developer based in Nairobi Kenya. She said “African technologists should emulate the successes of Western companies like Apple and Google, but they must work on ideas that work specifically in local conditions”. She created a smartphone map of Nairobi in 2007, before Google published theirs. Colaco also has a boot camp training others to develop mobile apps.
One of her students created a text message app that alerts fishermen when fish trigger sensors in a certain area of a local lake, she said. That way, the fishermen will know exactly where and when to put their lines in the water.
Even though educating people on the uses of technology still remains a big problem in Africa, it is a big deal to know that Africans are starting to adopt simple technology like mobile apps to solve some of their daily problems.
World mobile OS by region
[via cnn]
