Ben Botes talks about the need for what Grameen Bank has done for India in South Africa. I agree, except not just South Africa needs it – all of Africa does.

Those who I spoke to in Kenya this summer will remember me talking rather excitedly about the need and opportunity surrounding a mobile banking system that I called AfriPay. I didn’t really get into it in that post, but the opportunity goes beyond just providing a payment system, it also opens the door for an easy way to track and manage micro-loans.

How easy would it be to create a way for Africans to sign up for AfriPay and then allow them to also get access to a micro-loan? The numbers could start small enough that a default wouldn’t blow the system. Say you started by offering up $10 for people with no credit history, no land and no banking record. As they proved responsible with it, that amount could gradually increase so that at a later date they had access to greater and greater amounts of credit.

What is needed is a starting point. Everyone knows how hard it is to just get that first bit to get on your way – this would provide that opportunity to the “long-tail” of users. Marry that up with the AfriPay system and you’ve got a real winner on your hands.

A lot of Western investors are wary of investing in Africa. Who cares? Let’s have some African investors step up and do something here. As Muhammed Yunus has shown in India, a grassroots movement does not take inordinate amounts of capital to get going. It does need capital though, and it would behoove Africa to take it upon themselves to build this.

I’m quickly becoming a fan of “Modern Life is Rubbish“, a blog about technology and statistics. They always seem to have some new amazingly well-done chart with interesting information. They had one back in July that covered the number of IP addresses assigned around the world. An IP address (Internet Protocol Address) is a unique address that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network.

The map below shows this data. Those countries with more than 1 IP per person are in green, those with 1 IP for every 10 people are in yellow, 1 IP for 100 people in orange, and so on.

African countries represent the bottom of the chart. Actually, 8 of the bottom 10 are African countries (Madacascar, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic, Burundi, Malawi, Ethiopia, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo). That’s not a good thing, but not altogether that surprising either.