britone mwasaru

In the book Prosperity Paradox, Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Oromo & Karen Dillion bring up an interesting concept of “how to identify high-potential pockets of nonconsumption” with regard to solutions that you might be providing. They state there are four things to look out for: skill, wealth, access and time. This got me thinking about examples where this might have been used.

Facebook is a good example. They realised that a large number of people are not using their platforms because of a number of issues.

• Lack of internet access – so they came up with platforms like internet.org to get more people connected and accessing their platform with the goal of getting more eyeballs seeing ads, their revenue model
• Low end devices – sitting in San Francisco, you might not understand the low internet speed or low end devices that your customers are using. Facebook realised that access to Facebook is slow and devices had less storage, memory capacity in emerging markets. To solve the affordability challenge, they launched Facebook Lite. They even acquired a startup that worked on this, story here https://tech.facebook.com/engineering/2020/8/facebook-lite-made-in-tel-aviv/

Google is also an interesting example. At the core of Google’s model is selling ads. To address the lack of ad buyers in new markets they focused on the lack of digital marketing skills. They went on to launch the a campaign to train 1 million people on the African continent. Story here https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-africa/one-million-trained-task-getting-africa-digital-just-beginning/ This is very similar when you look at the Android ecosystem. Google has invested a lot in getting more people skilled to develop apps on the Adroid platform. Developer communities have been a success to drive more apps developed on the Android ecosystem.

There is an interesting discussion around emerging technologies on the African continent. It was blockchain technology a few months ago and now the hype train is on artificial intelligence. The question again is what’s our position around these technologies. There are those who are worried that the technology will be built outside and consumed on the continent. There are a number of challenges that can be looked at in the lens of what the book ‘Prosperity Paradox’ states as the reason for nonconsumption.

1. Skill – do we have the skills to build using these emerging technologies. To solve this should we focus on building skills to build solutions using the emerging technologies? Will the skill remain or leave for better opportunities away from home?
2. Wealth – do we have the capital to afford the expensive compute need to build artificial intelligence models? The compute needed is not cheap. Solution could be invest in the startups working on this. We need to remember startup success rates is low, are we willing to burn that money. Should academia focus our research efforts towards this? Is the government going to provide grants to academia to pursue this?
3. Access – do we have access to data the raw material for artificial intelligence? For voice technology, languages like English have enormous digital ready data for training. Is the solution to build our own datasets? Should we make this datasets open for all of us to use? Will big tech take the data and use their readily available infrastructure to build tools for us to consume?

These are thoughts that have lingered in my head for a while and through my experience through my fellowship with the Mozilla Foundation building voice datasets for the Kiswahili language.

Please share your thoughts in the comment section 🙂