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WhiteAfrican

Where Africa and Technology Collide!

Author: HASH (page 1 of 106)

5 Good Recent Reports on African Tech – 2014

I keep meaning to write blog posts on each of these reports on tech, most of them on Africa, but can’t seem to get it done. Instead, I’ll just post a link to each, a visual, and why I think it’s worth reading.

1. The Akamai “State of the Internet” Q3 2013 report

[Akamai Report – PDF Download]

Has good information on overall usage globally, and trends. In Africa, even though they have a node in Kenya, all we’re seeing is stats on South Africa, Egypt and Morocco. However, there is a really fascinating chart by Ericsson in it on wireless usage.

Mobile data vs voice growth globally - 2013

Mobile data vs voice growth globally – 2013

2. GSMA’s “Digital Entrepreneurship in Kenya” report 2014

[GSMA – Entrepreneurship in Kenya report 2014 – PDF Download]

The GSMA puts together some fantastic reports, due to the amount of data at their fingertips due to their association’s membership. Alongside the iHub Research team, they’ve done a deep dive into the tech entrepreneurship side of Kenya, and you can see the results here.

tech-in-kenya-stats-2013

3. Deloitte’s “Value of connectivity” report 2014

[Deloitte’s – Extending Internet Connectivity report 2014 – PDF Download]

The Deloitte folks do a study and argue that an increase in internet penetration could have a large impact on an emerging market country’s GDP.

“Deloitte estimates that the resulting economic activity could generate $2.2 trillion in additional GDP, a 72% increase in the GDP growth rate, and more than 140 million new jobs.”

Internet penetration worldwide - Deloitte Report 2013

4. infoDev’s “The Business Models of mLabs and mHubs” report 2014

[The Business Models of mLabs and mHubs 2014 – PDF Download]

I’ve had a front-row seat to infoDev’s work starting and supporting places like the m:lab in East Africa. After doing it for 3 years, here’s their indepth report on what’s working, not working, how much money has been spent and what the future might look like.

Comparison of Key Results across mLabs - 2014

5. McKinsey’s “The Internet’s transformative potential in Africa” report 2013

[MGI Lions go digital_Full report_Nov 2013 – PDF Download]

Mostly useful due to the interest large corporates and banks put in McKinsey, this report makes that the greatest impact of the internet in Africa is likely to be concentrated in six sectors: financial services, education, health, retail, agriculture, and government. What they’ve done particularly well is gather a large range of numbers from diverse and various sources to make better sense of what’s going on.

Penetration and usage vary widely across the continent

Experiencing Ethiopia: Tech Hubs (Part 2)

As I was getting ready to head to Ethiopia last week to speak at a conference, one of the main things on my agenda was to see IceAddis. To my surprise, I also found out of a new community-based tech hub, called xHub, that’s about to go live. Here some of my thoughts on both.

IceAddis

IceAddis - made from 6 shipping containers

IceAddis – made from 6 shipping containers


IceAddis is renowned in the African tech hub community for their amazing design. This is for good reason, as they sit on the EiABC, the architectural and design school at the university. They’ve been part of the AfriLabs network from early on, and one of their co-founders, Oliver, was kind enough to pick me up and take me to see the space.

There is a semi-finalist from Ethiopia in this years Pivot East event, for the first time ever, and it’s not surprising that they came from IceAddis. In fact, I ran into one of the founders in Addis, and I’m excited to see a company from a new country in this year’s event.

Online Hisab (Ethiopia): Online Hisab is a cloud-based accounting package for Ethiopian SMEs, who are looking for an affordable and easy to use accounting solution.

I’ve never been a fan of seeing tech hubs or labs showing up on university campuses (as I’ve never been a fan of government run/setup ones). The team at IceAddis confirmed why. Due to the amounts of bureaucracy inherent in the system, it makes doing anything almost impossible. Their space was fairly empty when I came through, likely due to time of the day, but this also might be due to location in town or due to being on campus.

The BRCK in IceAddis - useful as the university network was down

The BRCK in IceAddis – useful as the university network was down

One really great thing I got to see was their maker space, which is only used by the architectural school, but they do some amazing things with it and it holds great promise. Now, if only Ethiopia would bring some consistency to component and equipment import regulations.

xHub

xHub - Ethiopia's newest tech hub (possible logo)

xHub – Ethiopia’s newest tech hub (possible logo)

The moment I stepped into the hotel in Addis Ababa, I was met by one of the local tech guys, Kibrom Tadesse who started telling me about this new tech hub that he was planning called xHub. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it, and on Saturday he arranged for me to be picked up by his business partner and primary driver behind the space, named Tedd Tadesse (his brother-in-law).

Teddy Tadesse of the xHub gives me a tour

Teddy Tadesse of the xHub gives me a tour

I wasn’t sure what to expect, to be honest, and was thinking that they might be better served by joining with IceAddis. However, after talking at length with Teddy and seeing the location, I changed my mind and realized that there was indeed room for both spaces in the community. The community badly needs a space that is enterprise and entrepreneur-focused, that is welcoming to the business community.

First, the xHub space is amazing. The building that it’s at and floors it can take up are just what you’d expect from a top-end community tech hub in one of Africa’s major capitals. If they can wring a deal out of the landlord for the roof space, it’ll be the best event space on the continent.

The xHub roof space in Addis (undeveloped)

The xHub roof space in Addis (undeveloped)

xHub in Addis - they would be on the left side of this picture

xHub in Addis – they would be on the left side of this picture

The plan is to get the community involved in the build-out, design and use of the xHub right away, and have the space in a usable fit and condition with 4-6 weeks. I’m excited about it, and I know the community is as well, as I talked to a number of young entrepreneurs and coders later that day.

Thoughts on the Addis Tech Community

Local mobile app and web devs get to work

Local mobile app and web devs get to work


After a lot of discussions with the tech hub leaders, a few tech entrepreneurs, over a dozen computer science and engineering students, and then experiencing the internet in Ethiopia, I came away with a few thoughts.

  • The tech community in Addis is smart, hungry and realizes the potential of the country they live in. It felt a little like Nairobi in 2005, where there was this growing desire to get connected (faster), build businesses and show up on the global stage.
  • The infrastructure of connectivity in Ethiopia is constrained by government monopoly on telcoms (mobile) and internet, so they really struggle for good service.
  • Due to their foreign currency trade restrictions, investors aren’t keen to work in the market too deeply. This means funding and access to other markets are hard.
  • With the size of the local market (some 80 million people) they realize there is a home market, and some of the businesses are honing in on the b2b and public-sector opportunities.

I’m curious as to what will happen next. The tech hubs seem like the best vector, since they provide a nexus point for activities and people finding each other. Being in a country where government control is so heavy, these tech hubs have to work with the government, and I hope that this will open doors and increase the flow of capital into the startups rather than constrain them.

Experiencing Ethiopia: Around Town (Part 1)

Having landed in Addis Ababa yesterday, I thought I might write down some of my impressions. The last time I was here was over 20 years ago, as I would fly between Khartoum and Nairobi for boarding school. Needless to say, much has changed, except for the warm hospitality of the Ethiopian people.

Mobile carrier’s and their spam advertising

No mobile carrier ads in Ethiopia's main aiport

No mobile carrier ads in Ethiopia’s main aiport


It’s non-existent here. I was shocked when I landed at the airport, since there were no billboards or ads for any mobile operators (only the phone manufacturers). I didn’t realize how much mobile operator advertising there is in the world until I got to Ethiopia.

2g vs 3g SIM cards
“What is that!?” I thought the guy who was telling me about them was confused, but he wasn’t. The actually sell SIM cards that are different here, and you can’t buy 3g SIM cards right now, since the government-run company (ETC) that manages all ISP and mobile carrier traffic is upgrading to 4g. They’ll sell 4g cards then, and until then you’re stuck with sipping out of the 2g straw.

Rent-a-SIM

Feleg with the working BRCK using ETC

Feleg with the working BRCK using ETC


Luckily I have a friend who has a friend, named Feleg, who rents SIM cards. He’s an Ethiopian techie who spent much of his life in Colorado, and is now back building his own businesses. Besides hooking me up with a 3g SIM which now runs in the BRCK, it turns out Feleg is a really good front-end engineer and UX guy.

The Internet Speeds
They remind me of internet speeds in Kenya in 2007, pre-undersea cable. Usable, but not great. Everyone says that they were faster until recently, when all the big road works started to cut the cables and cause some disruption in the service.

The Roads are Amazing
Hardly any traffic and really well built. There are advantages to a centralized autocracy, as Rwanda shows us as well. Police/soldier are everywhere – literally on every corner. Traffic is hit/miss, but overall moves faster than in Kenya. Mostly due to there not being a lot of cars. Importing a car here has seemingly arbitrary rates of duty, ranging from 100-500% (so I was told) and that number might change while the vehicle is in-transit.

Great Leather

Enzi - high-end leather shoes made in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Enzi – high-end leather shoes made in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia


I didn’t know this before, but Ethiopia is renowned for it’s leather. Some of my old contacts have a shoe company called Enzi Footwear, who make some of the best quality leather shoes you’ll find anywhere. One of the founders works in Italy’s fashion markets, so you can guess just how nice they are. Unfortunately, they didn’t have my big shoe size, but you might see Bono wearing a pair from time-to-time.

Managing with Trust and Expectation

For the past 6 years I’ve been part of a rather unique organization in Ushahidi, where we decided early on that how we’d run the organization was that we would trust each other and expect that everyone would act like responsible adults. It’s worked brilliantly, even as we’ve grown and spun up new enterprises and organizations such as iHub and BRCK.

Yesterday I read about the Berkshire Hathaway “strategy of trust”:

Mr. Munger, 90, was ruminating on the state of corporate governance, offering a counternarrative to the distrustful culture of most businesses: Instead of filling your ranks with lawyers and compliance people, he argued, hire people that you actually trust and let them do their job.

It’s well worth a read, and I didn’t expect to find parity in leadership philosophy between us and a 300,000-person family of organizations.

How do we do it?

There are probably other organizations like ours, ones who have decided to trust their team and assume that people make good decisions based out of the best intentions of the organization and their colleagues, over themselves. We didn’t set out with a great body of knowledge on how to do this, but instead with some theories that we’ve refined over time. Here are the most important ones:

Find the Right People
David, Juliana and I particularly don’t like to micromanage. We’ll work with you to define the goal, but if you expect someone to tell you how to get there, you won’t fit. We don’t check up on you all the time, you tell us when there’s a snag. You need to work autonomously. We’ll help, and are always there for a conversation, but your job is to get from point A to point B.

It’s always better to find people who are smart and get things done, who can work autonomously and tend to not put themselves first. Big egos don’t go well with this kind of team, so we look for humility when interviewing.

I remember making a mistake back in 2009, hiring someone off of reputation and resume, without really digging into their portfolio or doing multiple interviews. Ever since then I’ve refused to look at CVs or resumes and each new person goes through about 4-5 other people on the team before we make the final decision. Those other people on the team catch things I wouldn’t, some about skill, but most about ethos and personality.

Knowing the Ethos
If an emergency happens where you are, can you make a decision and run with it, without having to ask permission? You should be able to. This is especially important in an organization with a globally distributed team that deals with crisis and disaster. We decided that everyone should be able to make critical decisions about deployments of the software, partnerships and strategic steps on their own. Just fill everyone else in on it as it comes up and if adjustments need to be made, then we do it together.

To make this work, we had to ensure that everyone on the team, from junior engineers to new QA staff actually understood the foundational elements of the organization. Not just what we built, but why we built it, how it all started and where we were going in the future. While there’s no “intro to X” classes, we do throw you in the deep end early on. It started with our first hire, Henry Addo from Ghana, who found himself speaking in the French Senate in Paris in his first month on the job. That made us realize that public speaking forces you to learn a lot more about the organization that you’re in, quickly.

Our goal is that a camera and mic can be put in front of any team member and they can answer any question on the organization. The way they answer it might be different than me due to speaking styles, but because they understand the ethos of the organizations, it is still correct.

Per Diems
We don’t do per diems. You’re traveling for the organization, spend what you need on food, lodging and transport. Be responsible about it, since this is money needed for the organization to grow. If you’re in NYC, we know things are more expensive, if you’re in Omaha we know they’re not. The “Agency Effect” (or Principal Agent Problem) comes into play here as the incentives are wrong between a team member and the organization if they get an allowance for travel.

Final Thoughts

I suppose what I’m saying is that if you truly trust people to act like the adults they are and to do the right thing, they generally do. All the corporate oversight you can apply won’t stop an Enron from happening, so something else has to work. It has to be something that’s real though, people can sniff out very quickly if it’s a manufactured, or fake, trust. This means as much of the onus lies on the leaders to “let go” as it does for the team members to shoulder and own the expectations that come with their role.

My greatest takeaway from the Mr. Munger and Mr. Buffett was found in the last paragraph:

Mr. Munger, in a previous annual meeting, contended that the best way to hold managers accountable is to make them eat their own cooking. Mr. Munger pointed to the late Columbia University philosophy professor, Charles Frankel, who believed “that systems are responsible in proportion to the degree in which the people making the decisions are living with the results of those decisions.” Mr. Munger cited the Romans, “where, if you build a bridge, you stood under the arch when the scaffolding was removed.

We all need to stand under our own bridges more often, and I’m going to figure out how to make that happen in my organizations.

A Kenyan Tech Ecosystem Report 2014

The Emergence, Challenges and Potential of the Kenyan Tech Ecosystem” is a Report by Julia Manske published by the Vodafone Institute. Follow the link above for an overview and a podcast on the topic.

[PDF Download of the “The Emergence, Challenges and Potential of the Kenyan Tech Ecosystem” Report.]

A tech ecosystem map of Nairobi

There are a lot of reports that touch on the tech developments in Kenya over the years, but few do as good of a job painting the background picture and how it has taken a few years to develop. Here’s a rather long excerpt, which gives a pretty good 10,000 foot view of the last 4-6 years in the Nairobi tech space:

With the success of M-Pesa Kenya advanced to the position of a global pioneer and international point of reference for mobile payment systems. For the first time Kenya was associated with technology-driven innovation. International media and large companies took notice of the African country. This had an effect on the Kenyans’ self-image. M-Pesa’s success became an identity-forming narrative; the idea that an innovation can come out of Kenya crystallised in the collective memory of the younger generation in particular.

Similar to the butterfly effect,16 M-Pesa became the trigger and driver of a new ecosystem of mobile technological innovations. It created a mood in which resources were pooled and key thinkers from the Kenyan tech and start-up scene got together. This development was accelerated by the foundation of the Ushahidi platform that was set up at the start of 2008 following the uprisings in the context of the Kenyan presidential elec- tions. As a reaction to the violence, an ad hoc team of developers and bloggers came together to collect witness statements via SMS and plot them on a Google map, thereby initiating what is termed “activist mapping”. The free open source service is now used by bloggers and activists across the world, for example for the earthquake at Christchurch or the Gaza war in 2008. The company that came out of this process enjoys high levels of familiarity in Kenya and its founders have become leading digital opinion makers.

One of the Ushahidi founders, the blogger Erik Hersman, was struck by the absence of places to exchange ideas in Kenya and so in 2010 he set up the iHub, one of the first co-working spaces for companies from the tech scene in Africa.

This was followed by a whole host of further technology spaces, incubators and accelerators. The Bishop Magua Centre, the fourth floor of which is occupied by the iHub, is also home to the spin-offs iHub Research, the iHub UX Lab, the start-ups Ushahidi, mFarm, Frontline SMS, mLab, the accelerator Nailab, Kopo Kopo, Preakelt and the Africa office of GSMA. The Who’s Who of the Kenyan tech scene is housed in a single building. Other actors such as the accelerators 88mph and The Growth Hub have set up shop in the immediate vicinity. Large multinational companies such as Google, Microsoft, GSMA, Nokia and IBM have opened branches and research centres. This development is facilitated by a liberal economic system with a dynamic and strong private sector that promotes efficiency, competition and overseas investments. Within seven years Nairobi has developed into an African centre of technological innovations – journalists dub it “Silicon Savannah”.

The success story of Kenya also radiated to other African countries. Technology experts, developers and designers started cooperating and by doing so gave rise to the technological ecosystem that they had been missing until that point. Especially Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia and South Africa saw similar developments as in Kenya. Large development organisations, such as InfoDev which is associated with the World Bank, setup co-working spaces and accelerators. Microsoft, Google and individual investors financed the expansion of a range of start-up centres in the African metropolises. Spread across the continent there are now over 35 locations for tech innovations in 13 African countries – of which many are members of the AfriLabs [www.afrilabs.com] alliance. These generate new inventions and mobile and digital business ideas every year.

It’s a good report, worth a read and it covers a lot besides this, including a recipe for creating a tech ecosystem:

  1. Create access to funding capital
  2. Promote lasting structures
  3. Establish competences
  4. Set up stable real and virtual networks

Maps of Africa: Private Equity and Infrastructure Investment 2013

The good folks over at Africa Assets have teamed up with Cross Border Information to release these two maps. The first on private equity investment in Africa in 2013 and the second on infrastructure investment in the same year.

Private Equity Investment in Africa 2013

Private Equity info Map of Africa – 2013 (PDF Download)

There was a total of 83 PE deals. 44 were reported totaling $4.3 billion.

Private Equity info Map of Africa - 2013

Private Equity info Map of Africa – 2013

Infrastructure Investment in Africa 2013

Africa Map of Infrastructure Investments in 2013 (PDF Download)

If you add up all of what Europe, the US and all the multilaterals together put into Africa, the total is $15,368,000,000 ($15.4b USD). China alone put in $13,360,000,000 ($13.4b USD). Is it any wonder that the African leaders of today look east to China more than the west to the US and EU?

Africa Map of Infrastructure Investments in 2013

Africa Map of Infrastructure Investments in 2013

A Suswa Excursion

BRCK Excursion: Mt. Suswa from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

We took a day ride out past the Ngong Hills into the Rift Valley and up Mt. Suswa. Here’s a (very) short video where were playing with a DJI Phantom 1 and a GoPro to do some flyovers of the vehicles. We went with 4 motorcycles (2 KLR 650s, 1 Suzuki DR650, and a BMW 650GS Dakar), plus a Landrover Defender 90. A good grouping of bikes and a backup vehicle, and a day with some fun dirt riding. The rocky road up to the top of Mt. Suswa is a lot of fun, and I was glad there had been rain the day before in order to reduce the dust.

The Masai live on Suswa, and though it looks bleak and unforgiving from down below, once you get to the top there is a lot of nice land for grazing and for growing crops. There’s also an extensive network of large lava caves. We explored through a few of them with our guide Jermiah (pictured below).

For this picture, we’re standing in the “Baboon Parliament”, a huge entrance to a cave, with it’s own skylight. The baboons live above, and they congregate, play and have meetings in the area where we are standing. It smells horribly, as all of the beautiful colors on the rock are from baboon urine, and all of the dirt below is baboon crap. If you go further inside, there’s a bat colony.

Here’s the BRCK sitting on the top rock in the baboon parliament’s cave.

We came back by the satellite dishes in the valley, through Mai Mahiu and up the Lower Road. Luckily we didn’t get any rain, though we did have to contest with cars deciding to come towards us on Waiyaki Way, when there was a jam going the other direction. It’s quite a shock to face oncoming traffic when you’re on a road with a wall between you and the other lanes…

Maps of Africa: Tech Hubs Across the Continent

Tech Hubs in Africa - 2014 Map

Tech Hubs in Africa – 2014 Map

[Tech Hubs in Africa 2014 – PDF Download]

There are now 90 tech hubs/labs in 28 countries around Africa.

A current 2014 map of tech hubs in Africa, done by the World Bank, iHub Research and BongoHive. Read the original article here, “Tech hubs across Africa: Which will be the legacy-makers?” by Tim Kelley.

As exhaustive as this is, I think there are a few missing. I believe that there are two new ones in Zimbabwe not showing up, Muzinda Hub and Hypercube Hub (though, I’m not 100% that they’re up and going as running spaces). All that to say, more keep cropping up, and that’s a good thing.

+ JoziHub, which is also missing.

What Twitter can tell us about African cities

The Atlantic just wrote this emotional piece predicting Twitter’s demise (don’t worry, apparently they write a lot of “end of” stories). Personally, I believe Mark Twain’s misquote fits perfectly here, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Twitter study of Nairobi - 2013

My friend Jonathan Ledgerd just sent me some links to the work that he and his colleagues have been doing at EPFL’s Afrotech Future Africa Initiative (Afrotech-EPFL) in Switzerland. They took all the geolocated tweets from Nairobi over a 3-month period near the end of 2013, with a total of 200,000 tweets in the data set.

The first of several such Twitter maps for African cities is Nairobi, you can find it here: http://twitter.lab.idiap.ch/

(Click on the top right icon to display and keep zooming in – at maximum granularity you can see exactly where the animals hang out in Nairobi National Park based on geolocated Twitter traffic.)

Twitter use in Nairobi. 200k tweets over a 3 month period in 2013

Twitter use in Nairobi. 200k tweets over a 3 month period in 2013

A few of Jonathan’s findings:

Tweeting does not mean production
More tweets are sent from Nairobi’s golf courses than from its factories. The industrial area of Nairobi, along Enterprise Road, produces some 8% of Kenya’s GDP, but sends sends fewer tweets than are sent from the fairways of the nearby Kenya Railway Golf Club.

Twitter is not yet embedded in the state.
Police, army and air force hardly use Twitter at all. The Kenyan army barracks on Langata Road is home to several thousand of the country’s infantry and elite commandos. It posts almost no Tweets, compared to the dense Twitter traffic produced on the road itself and in the new housing estate opposite the entrance to the barracks. Similarly, the Kenyan air force base in Eastleigh does not Tweet. By contrast, the mostly ethnic Somali community living along the edge of the base are active tweeters. More data is required to determine if government ministries reflect the pattern of the city’s military bases. If so, there may be implications for a state moving on an information cycle which is slower and less precise than that used by younger Kenyans in the private sector.

Twitter is still in English language
81% of recorded tweets were in English according to an automatic language detection system. Only 5% were in Kiswahili. The rest were in an array of other languages including Hindi, Kikuyu, Somali, Luo, the Sheng dialect, and other languages. Many of these were mixed with English. This contrasts with the wider use of Kenyan tribal languages on Facebook and in text messaging. The use of English is uniform even in the lower income dormitory towns such as Wajere and Rongai. More research is needed, but the brevity allowed to tweets as well as the common platform might force the use of English.

But Twitter is becoming more pervasive
The first tweet in Kenya was probably the one sent by the co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, from the lounge of the Mount Kenya Safari Club on August 11, 2007. There are now 250,000+ active Twitter accounts in Nairobi – 6 Twitter accounts per 100 Nairobians, against estimated mobile phone density of 80 mobiles per 100 Nairobians.

There are a lot more observations than this, which you can find on the map if you toggle the control on the upper-right.

Unequal Distribution and Perception of Emerging Markets

35 percent of the world is onlineThere’s quite a good read up on the Tech Coctail site titled, “What (US) VC’s Are Missing in a Rising World of Smartphones“. It’s a little about smartphones, though the underlying discussion points are really about how blind the investors in the West are to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia due to their preconditioning on Silicon Valley being the only place that big tech things happen. Meanwhile, massive deals are ongoing in the Middle East and Asia that are under the radar.

But Western VC’s are slow, and US VCs in particular are slow to catch on to this trend. In part, this is because US investors are accustomed to seeing the best US deals, and they are used to dealing with our ecosystem, our rule of law, the network effect of talent that is Silicon Valley, and other places here that are attracting dollars accordingly.

After spending 3 months raising investment for the BRCK company in the US, EU and Africa I can confirm that there is a great deal of investor unease in putting money into something in Africa from the US. Silicon Valley types tend to pay lip service to this idea, but don’t actually invest their money that easily.

I just wrote a post on the BRCK blog about what Juliana brought up at TED last year about “unequal distribution”, this time shown on a world map of the internet of things. This idea of unequal distribution of information and how it played into the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution and now the digital revolution that we’re sitting in today.

Thingful.net - mapping the internet of things

Thingful.net – mapping the internet of things

Unequal distribution is not static, it’s a constant dynamic where no one region of the world will lead indefinitely. ITU stats already point out that 65% of the people who get onto the internet today come from emerging markets. Meanwhile, only 24% of the people in emerging markets are online. That means that whether the West realizes it or not, the internet focus has already shifted, the ripples of this are only now being felt.

If you think that Google’s, Yahoo’s, Cisco’s, Intel’s (and many other’s) partnership in the Alliance for Affordable Internet and Facebook’s Internet.org strategies around global internet connectivity are just CSR activities, then you’re sorely mistaken. These companies (literally) see the numbers and the know that they need to stake a claim in the regions where the future of the internet already are.

Where Facebook's users are coming from 2012 vs 2014

Where Facebook’s users are coming from 2012 vs 2014

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