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Where Africa and Technology Collide!

Tag: uganda (page 2 of 4)

Snapshot: Mobile Data Costs in East Africa

IMG_0073I get asked a lot about mobile data costs in East Africa, so thought I would put it in writing for everyone to find easier.

Mobile data access charges have fallen drastically in the last several years in East Africa, in large part to the SEACOM undersea cable arriving and increased competition between operators. Data connectivity is the new battleground, fighting not just amongst mobile competitors, but also with traditional ISPs.

In the mobile data connectivity space, each country sells either data capped bundles (or time capped bundles in the case of Uganda) that can be loaded onto a SIM card. There are out of bundle charges, priced per Megabyte or Kilobyte, but these rates are exorbitant, so anyone who connects regularly uses a bundle of some sort.

More creative offerings come out each month by the mobile operators, making it more confusing and harder to compare against competing services, but also offering some incredibly low pricing for entry-level users, or consumers who don’t need high speeds.

No doubt, a downward trend of mobile data charges will spur the growth of mobile web usage and publisher forwards.

Kenya
In Kenya, from charging internet usage at 10 shillings a minute just a few years ago, now cyber cafes charge 1 shilling a minute for browsing. The use of mobile data has been made easier by increasingly cheaper rates. For example in Kenya, Safaricom are offering a limited 10MB worth of mobile internet usage at 8 shillings per day. Zain Kenya offers unlimited internet usage for 3,000 shillings per month. Orange Kenya on the other hand are having a 7-day unlimited offer for their 3G network at 1000 shillings.

Uganda
In Uganda costs for mobile data connectivity have been driven down by the SEACOM cable landing in 2009, and led by costs cutting by Orange. Orange was first to the market with cheap, affordable 3G service and has played a major role in driving market prices down. They were the first to institute 5,000Ush/day & 25,000Ush/week packages for Internet – finally making it accessible to the common man. MTN, the larger network in Uganda,

Tanzania
Tanzania boasts some of the most unreliable data networks with the least penetration within East Africa. Zain and Vodacom both offer 3g, while Tigo offers GPRS. Zantel and Sasatel are CDMA networks, with EVDO connectivity. All networks, no matter what the speed of the connection, charge a flat rate of 40,000Tsh for 1gb of data. Data prices have gone down, but not noticeably.

While not possible to do an apples-to-apples comparison of the rates between the three countries, here is a pricing comparison chart for 3g data on 1Gb bundles and 1Mb pay as you go costs for the leading operator in each country:

Kenya
(Safaricom)
Tanzania
(Vodacom)
Uganda
(MTN)
1Gb of 3g data
(bundle)
2500 Ksh 40,000 Tsh 49,000 Ush
USD equivalent 1Gb of 3g data
(bundle)
$30.90 $26.56 $21.63
1Mb of 3g data
(Pay as you go)
8 Ksh 120 Tsh 900 Ush
USD equivalent 1Mb of 3g data
(Pay as you go)
$0.10 $0.08 $0.40

As is true in this hyper competitive market, these numbers will change (hell, I’m probably already off on something). The overriding trend is that the costs are going down for consumers, even if slower than we’d all like to see.

[Picture courtesy of Stefan Magdalinski]

SwiftRiver: Curating in an Age of Information Overload

In an age of information abundance, curating meaning is key.

9 months ago that is just what Jon Gosier set out to do as he took over the reins of the SwiftRiver initiative at Ushahidi. Today he announces the Beta release, and unveils the new website at Swiftly.org.

What is SwiftRiver?

SwiftRiver Open Beta Announcement. from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

“SwiftRiver is an open source intelligence gathering platform for managing realtime streams of data.”

Using 5 different tools in the toolbox, you can create a host of useful applications. Tools ranging from natural language processing to handling duplicates, or a source’s importance in the ecosystem. Much like a box of Lego’s, the value and usefulness of the apps created are up to the creator.

SwiftRiver lets users:

  • Manage realtime data streams (e.g. RSS, SMS, Twitter, Email)
  • Identify relationships between content (e.g. email and tweets)
  • Set parameters to auto-filter incoming feeds
  • Curate content based on preferences

Swift code and web services

Like all Ushahidi work, the code is free and open source, anyone can download it, contribute to the code, and run it on their own server. Due to it’s complexity, SwiftRiver also offers a software as a service solution, allowing you to tap our servers for your own needs. Swift Web Services (SWS) is our cloud platform. The platform offers a number of different APIs to developers. With this platform you can easily beef up your applications with natural language processing & active learning, reverse geocaching, distributed reputation, content filtering and web analytics.

This first app, called the Sweeper is the first project to enter Beta and now ships with SwiftRiver. Sweeper, is a term Ushahidi uses to refer to people who ’sweep’ through a system, performing certain tasks, and it was for this reason that we put the Ushahidi resources behind the whole initiative.

SwiftRiver | Sweeper

SwiftRiver | Sweeper

History, contributors and code

The origins of SwiftRiver are in the community of Ushahidi developers and users. Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla asked some hard questions after the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, discussing the need for something that can help with this information overload we have in the first few hours of an emergency or disaster. Today, we’re seeing the first fruits of that technology, and it’s exciting to know that the potential for it’s use goes far beyond the crisis scenarios that we first envisioned.

Matthew Griffiths (Uganda) and Neville Newey (South Africa) have done a great job hacking out much of the code and designing the architecture for the platform. They’ve been joined by an army of volunteers and contributors, including: Joshua Bronson, Soe, Nishith Rastogi, Mang-Git Ng, Josh Bronson, Ivan Kavuma, Andrew Turner, Chris Blow, Kaushal Jhalla, Ed Bice, Moses Mugisha, Victor Miclovich, Wolfgang Werner, M. Edward Borasky, Maarten J. van der Veen, Ahmed Maawy, Colin Meinke. A huge round of thanks to everyone who gave freely of their time and energy to move this project forward!

Find out more on the website at Swiftly.org
Download the code, v.0.5 Cape Jazz

Quick Hits around African Tech

Understanding what drives Mpesa agents
Growing the agent network is one of the most challenging parts of a mobile payment system.

“The number one cost for most agents was liquidity management – moving cash. Agents report a host of expenses, including bank charges, transport costs, and fees to aggregators who advance commissions and provide easy float/cash swaps for agents. On average, liquidity management consumed 30% of total expenses.”

Asynchronous Info, Disjointed Data and Crisis Reporting
Jon Gosier talks about Uganda’s riots and what he’s learned in the process.

Africa’s diaspora and the cloud
Teddy Ruge writes a great essay on the web and Africa’s diaspora.

“There’s a cloud gathering over Africa; a storm of connected thoughts and ideas that are pushing African countries violently forward. The Diaspora is using emerging web technologies in increasing numbers, frequency, and variety to stay connect with Africa, simultaneously charting a new digital course for it’s economic independence on the world stage.”

New Africa broadband ‘ready’
The BBC Digital Planet team is in Kenya and doing a knock-up job of interviewing people about what’s going on around the tech space there.

Emmanuel Kala in Nairobi
(Note: all the people in the BBC “in pictures” for this day are part of the Ushahidi extended dev team in Kenya)

Mobiles offer lifelines in Africa
Ken Banks writes about mobile phone growth and development in Africa, stating “Africans are not the passive recipients of technology many people seem to think they are.”

Should we be Building SMS or Internet Services for Africa?

Interesting mobile phone

Probably one of my favorite discussions of this trip was entered into after the Uganda Linux User Group (LUG) meeting here in Kampala. It was about whether we should be providing internet protocol (IP) services first, rather than SMS. If cost is the single most important factor for any mobile service aimed at ordinary Africans, then what will it take to move the ball from the SMS court to the IP court? This isn’t just for non-profits to consider, but everyday businesses as well.

Phones that can access data networks have always been in short supply here, so the easy answer has always been to use SMS, just because that’s what people have in their pocket and can use right now. While there are great arguments for either decreasing the costs of SMS, or of moving to IP, the practicality of that was remote due to the costs involved. Either you need a big organization, or a government, who can force the mobile operators to lower their rates on SMS (their cash cow), or you need to have the costs of data-enabled phones to decrease enough that the majority of users switch to them.

There is an argument that says that Grameen’s and Google’s recent deal with MTN Uganda didn’t go far enough in pushing for free, or cheaper, messaging for their new services. Whether you agree or disagree on that matter isn’t relevant if you bypass the argument altogether and provide services via data, which is drastically cheaper, using SMS as the backup.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that for the first time, last year, mobile phones shipped to Africa with data service capabilities outnumbered the simple SMS-only phones that are so prevalent on the continent (Gartner 2009). Of course, this doesn’t mean that there will be a majority of IP accessible phone users immediately, but it is on its way.

Equally important to understand, and a point that increases the momentum of the mobile services over IP argument, is the fact that where there is mobile penetration, there is also available data services. This stands true in Uganda, where MTN says there is 92% GPRS coverage on their network. It’s even true in countries still trying to catch up, like Liberia, where though there are only islands of coverage, that coverage generally comes with data.

Reinier Battenberg, who runs the only local hosting in Uganda, brought up a great point. The fact that Google and Grameen weren’t able to significantly alter MTN’s position on the prices of SMS doesn’t matter. What matters is that Google didn’t offer an IP-based solution for their new Google Trader that they launched. That’s simply unbelievable! It’s doubtful if that type of work would take more than a day for an engineer to implement. Instead of effectively providing an end-run on the strategy around SMS, they just played the same game that the operator wants to play and will win. Something that Google really wants to do is drive people to the web, so why not at least provide web-services for those that can use it? It doesn’t make sense… all around it’s both curious and a questionable strategy.

Web Hosting and IXP Issues in Uganda

The Uganda IXP

I’ve spent the last couple days talking to web designers, programmers, systems administrators and businessmen about the situation in Uganda.

Technologists in Uganda have quite a job on their hands. Sitting, land-locked, behind Kenya and Tanzania they share most of those two countries problems, find that everything is more expensive, and then have to deal with a government who has little to know understanding of how technology can spur economic growth. On top of that, the local ISPs and the mobile operators are happily providing sub-par services at larcenous rates.

It’s no surprise then that we see a lot fewer quality programmers and web designers in Kampala than in Nairobi. However, though there are fewer, there is a great depth of talent available here in those that are doing this work, whether it’s Solomon King‘s Node Six, Jon Gosier‘s Appfrica Labs or Software Factory the creators of Kiva’s rival MYC4.

Local web hosting and the IXP

From what I could tell, there is only one hosting company setup for anyone to get started with a website in Uganda that runs a server from within the country. Few government websites are hosted locally, and the same remains true for almost all business or personal sites. Though there is excellent bandwidth locally, the international bandwidth is what is used, which means that no one (local) is winning.

What is surprising is that there is no local caching of international content going on at the Uganda IXP. If the Google Global Cache was being used, that alone would speed up local performance and make a better user experience. There are rumors of a Google Cache being used at either the ISP-level or Makerere, but that since it’s not using the UIXP, it cannot provide the service to all of the ISPs.

However, more important than that is the fact that it would significantly decrease the amount of international traffic. What’s mind boggling is that the local providers would still be able to charge the same rates, but decreasing international traffic through caching would increase their profit margins. I’m not quite sure why this isn’t being done, I wonder if the ISPs and mobile operators are just making too much money as it is and this is seen as more work than it’s worth.

Uganda’s IXP (international exchange point) is something of a mess too. Apparently, the two founders are in a bit of a squabble, with means each neutralizes the others decisions and nothing gets done. To make matters worse, the environment where it resides can only be considered as hostile to any type of electrical equipment. It’s in the basement of a parking garage where people wash cars providing a healthy dose of moisture, dust is in the air, and there is a general lack of upkeep on it.

Basically, all of the money ($106m) that the Ugandan government and the local ISPs and mobile operators are pouring into the infrastructure is reliant upon this one poor excuse for an IXP. It works, and the packets are switching, it’s just that the operation is not working in the optimal environment – physically or organizationally.

This is troubling for a number of reasons, but perhaps the biggest reason why it sits so poorly with me is that the government has a stated aim of getting more “local content” online. So, while there might be 10 Wimax providers going live by the end of the year in Kampala, there is little foundational infrastructure to support the peering between providers locally, regionally or internationally.

It seems that the biggest problems within the Uganda internet space is more about lack of holistic focus by the government and local ISPs and mobile operators. With a little effort, the peering, content hosting, costs and speed could be improved.

Blogging this week

This is a courtesy post so that you know most of my blogging this week is taking place at AfriGadget due to being one of the organizers for Maker Faire Africa coming up this weekend.

I’m also doing some work on the “FLAP Bag Project“, testing out modular, solar and light-equipped bags in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda with Timbuk2, Portable Light and Pop!Tech.

We’ve got a big release of Ushahidi coming up this week too, so keep an eye on the Ushahidi blog where I have another write-up coming.

Meetups in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda

August is a busy month. If you’re in Ghana, Kenya or Uganda and want to meetup about anything, let me know. Here’s a rough agenda for some open times and events on my schedule.

ghana-kenya-uganda

Ghana

I’ll be in Ghana from Aug 10-18, much of that time will be spent getting ready for and putting on Maker Faire Africa. If you’re attending that event, or want to carve out some time to chat before/after it, let me know.

We’re having an Ushahidi meetup on Wednesday, Aug 12th starting at 6pm at the Adabraka. If you want to know more about the project, let me, Henry Addo or Brian Herbert know.

I’m really interested in seeing some of the mobile and web apps that the Ghanaian community is working on. If you know someone working on something cool that I just shouldn’t miss, leave it in the comments.

Kenya

I’ve got a couple days in Kenya around Aug 19-20 and Aug 23-26. As usual, my Kenya time gets busy very quickly, so let me know now if you want to meet and I’ll see if I can slot it in. I’ve always got time for cool stuff. 🙂

I’m planning to have an Ushahidi meetup on Wednesday, Aug 26th starting at 6pm at the Prestige Plaza food court (as usual). Come meet the Ushahidi team that’s behind the latest “Goma” release. Also we’ll have the two newest members of Ushahidi in attendance.

Uganda

I’ve got a quick jaunt over to Uganda where I’ll be meeting up with the Appfrica team and Teddy Ruge. We’re also planning on having a tech meetup on Friday, Aug 20th. Again, let us know if you can make it.

As you can tell, it’s a little bit of a whirlwind trip. Follow along here for updates (and AfriGadget for the Maker Faire Africa reports).

Africa’s Poor: Premium SMS in the Crossfire

If you provide services to poor people, should you make a profit?

That’s essentially the question raised by Katrin Verclas on MobileActive, and it’s an excellent one. Specifically, Katrin calls out the new Google Trader service offered by Google in Uganda, in conjunction with the release yesterday of their SMS products with Grameen and MTN Uganda, one of the local mobile phone operators. Basically, they charge 220 Ugandan Shillings per use, instead of the median 110 UGS charge across most networks. This is called a premium SMS rate.

Google Trader price in Uganda

Premium SMS rates are charged so that third-party service providers can make money off of services that they provide over the mobile phone network. The operator makes their (ridiculously high) profit as normal, and the overage is for the third-party. You’ll find a lot of dating, event and sports services offered in this way all over the world, not least across Africa.

Back to the question

The question posed is if people who are claiming to help the poor should charge, and if so, should they make a profit?

I think we’ve seen from the Grameen model in Bangladesh (ex: Grameen Bank and Grameen Phone’s Village Phone program) that you can (and possibly should). By doing so you help both parties; first, by providing a service that consumers value and are willing to pay for, and second by making the business of running an operation self-sustaining. Many good business, or project, ideas die due to lack of sustainable cash flow.

For instance, if a 220 shilling SMS can save you the 1500 shilling visit to the doctor or veterinarian, or give you a 10% higher return for your crops, is it worth it?

Is there a problem in the question?

There ends up being a paternalist nuance to that original question. After all, is it up to us to decide what services to offer the poor and at what price? Aren’t poor people able to make the value-based decision on whether a trip to the doctor is more useful to them than a call or an SMS to one? If services are being offered, the person making the decision to call, SMS or go physically to solve their problem, or not, is ultimately the arbiter of whether or not a service has merit and should be offered. It’s a classic market-led approach – if the price is too high for the service, equilibrium will not be reached and one will give, usually price.

This is particularly true when talking about for-profit companies offering services – like Google is with Google Trader. They don’t operate under the same development/grant funded subsidization that a lot of others do in Africa. Even if their goal was not to make a profit on this service, they still need to cover internal costs, as does every organization that isn’t provided with free money.

Final thoughts

This space in Africa, of offering services to the poor (in lieu of the governments actually doing their jobs), has been primarily “owned” by large development and aid organizations. This has created a false floor for the economy, as projects and initiatives are propped up by outside money and services rarely have to survive on their own. This is changing, as low cost and high value options come into the market, be they mobile phone operators providing new communication opportunities, or cheap chinese batteries and LED lights for local energy/lighting needs.

I’m sensing a flux in the space, like two bull buffaloes before they fight, the heavyweights in the aid industry and in business are circling each other before they knock heads. The marketing is over who is helping the poor and marginalized in Africa best. In the end the market will decide, and regardless of the messages spouted by both sides, the “poor African” will choose the winner.

If there’s a problem with collusion and price fixing in an industry (like there sometimes seems to be with SMS services in a country), that’s something beyond the scope of individuals and needs to be tackled separately by regulation. However, that’s not the case here, we have expensive SMS services in East Africa, but the new entrants into the space always offer low rates, and the costs of switching providers is relatively low.

No, this is market-based competitive services and both non-profits and for-profits have the right to offer them at whatever price they like. Equally, individuals have the right to use it or not, be they premium SMS rates or not.

I’d like to hear some other African’s thoughts on this.

Do you want big multinationals like Google and MTN coming in and providing their services to you? Should we be asking questions for the poor, or is that condescending in itself? What is the sticking point here, and is there a side that I’m missing?

**UPDATE**
Thanks to Katrin’s email to Rachel Payne, Google’s lead in Uganda, we have the following response from her on this topic, and it does clarify quite a few unknowns:

Hi Katrin.

Yes, I saw your blog post where you speak in detail about the pricing. However, what is written is not quite accurate. You see, Google, Grameen and MTN launched three types of mobile services yesterday: Google SMS Tips (targeting low-income, rural users primarily), Google SMS Search (urban, mainstream) and Google Trader (all users).

The second service is somewhat similar to other “premium SMS” content services currently available (except that it is built on Google search technology) and therefore, is the same price as other content services. To accommodate the first group, we have priced Google SMS Tips at half the price of a content service; this is available for the cost of a person-to-person SMS, which many rural individuals are willing and able to afford currently.

The third service drives income and livelihood benefits, so we decided to begin charging at the normal content service rate and monitor whether this excludes rural communities or not (we did extensive testing during the pilot, which included pricing discussions and most of the users found that Google Trader provided far greater, direct value than the 110 shilling price difference). For all services, we are offering them for free for the first few months, just to ensure that all users have an equal opportunity to try them out, risk-free and allow them to access critical content during this period so that they can assess whether or not they would like to continue to use the service.

I hope this helps provide a bit more information that clarifies the questions raised.

New SMS Services in Uganda from Grameen, Google & MTN

Grameen Foundation’s AppLab has released a new suite of mobile phone applications developed in Uganda, using Google SMS Search and in partnership with MTN Uganda as the mobile operator. The services include:

  • Farmer’s Friend: a searchable database with both agricultural advice and targeted weather forecasts
  • Health Tips: provides sexual and reproductive health information
  • Clinic Finder: helps locate nearby health clinics and their services
  • Google Trader: matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities as well as other products. Local buyers and sellers, such as small-holder farmers, are able to broaden their trading networks and reduce their transaction costs. (known locally as “Akatale SMS”)

Caterpillar Question - Grameen, MTN and Google team up in UgandaBack in 2004 Grameen started to replicate in Uganda what they had done in Bangladesh with their Village Phone Operators. That is, they would go 20km beyond the best phone signal and provide a loan to a lady in the village that would let her buy a phone and an antenna that would extend the range of the network. The lady would then resell services to local individuals who didn’t have access, or the ability to buy their own phone.

I’m actually quite impressed with this initiative, as it fits in perfectly with Grameen’s mission: providing opportunity through the most basic of mobile phones. All of these services work on SMS-only phones, so anyone with a single bar of coverage and a phone has access to a lot of knowledge in their hands.

Here is a promo video from Uganda, explaining why these services are needed:

High-powered Partnerships

Beyond the applications themselves, what I find most compelling is how the Grameen Foundation collected such a high-powered group of partners. The list reads like a who’s-who of innovative mobile services and development in Africa with Google, MTN Uganda, Technoserve, Kiwanja.net, and BRODSI to name a few. It’s a mixture of for-profit businesses, local NGOs and non-profit tech organizations.

I remember a conversation a couple months back with Sian Townsend (Google) and Ken Banks (FrontlineSMS) about how they did the field studies for this project. Sian shared with us some of her research on mobile user experience while in Uganda – it was extensive. Through a month of rapid prototyping and studying how users were actually using the new services, the team quickly learned what was important and how to better serve information up to the end-user.

Though I haven’t been able to personally test the services yet, with this group, I would expect the results to be better than average. For instance, Google doesn’t tend to get involved with ideas that don’t scale. I imagine that they see replicability with both SMS Search and Google Trader in many other countries as well. Rachel Payne, the country manager for Google in Uganda, has a blog post here, but not much more information on the long-term plans for Google Trader. I’d be interested in seeing how this compares to Esoko out of Ghana.

google-trader-picture

Uganda’s Appfrica Labs

Jon Gosier runs Appfrica Labs. He’s been hard at work over the last year promoting technology all over Africa on his blog, and at the same time building a base for the technology incubator Appfrica Labs that he launched late last year with some external funding from European VC firm Kuv Capital. Jon is one of the most capable, energetic and social programmers that I know. He is entrepreneurial, understands the business side of things as well as the nuts and bolts of developing. In short, he’s about the perfect person to put your money behind if you’re going to invest in the African startup tech space.

Appfrica Labs Staff

Innovation in Uganda, by Ugandans, for Uganda

There’s something very powerful about the focus that Jon is applying to Appfrica Labs. I’m sure that there are opportunities and applications that he will incubate that stretch beyond Uganda, but he’s taking a measured approach. There’s enough low-hanging fruit in Uganda for him work on, so he’s starting there.

“The mission is to offer opportunities and work experience for East African software entrepreneurs so that they can then use their talents to bolster the growing local markets by creating their own products and companies. We pick up where local colleges like Makerere University leave off by offering hand-on experience in Java, C++, C#, Ruby on Rails, Django and Python, PHP, Perl, Kannel and various other programming languages that often can’t be taught in-depth in classes due to budget restraints.”

Jon notes that there are over 60,000 Facebook users in Kampala, and instead of creating yet another social network, he has decided to focus a fair bit of early development into this platform. He doesn’t focus on Twitter or other “hot Web 2.0 apps” which aren’t being used there by enough people yet.

Proof is in the development

A good example of this local Uganda focus is the apps and tools that are being developed right now. Here are just a couple examples, and I know first-hand that there are more on the way shortly:

Status.ug – an inexpensive, and efficient, mobile gateway for Ugandans to update Facebook via their mobile phone.

Answer Bird - UgandaAnswer Bird – Uses Facebook Connect to allow questions to be asked and answered in a Twitter-like interface more here).

OhmSMS – Get an SMS when your power is off at home or at the office, simply by keeping a cheap mobile phone plugged into an outlet.

Why this works

Appfrica Labs is not only a great idea, but it’s a blueprint for a new way for technologists to band together and create something in the face of a lot of difficulties in Africa. We all know of the problems faced when trying to get seed capital, or of the lack of traction when trying to sell ideas to the government or big businesses within a country.

What Jon has been able to do is create a brand which others can rally around and push their efforts forward as a collective. It’s about marketing, messaging and communication. He’s made a lot of headway for not just himself, but the other entrepreneurs in Uganda due in no small part to the hard work and late nights put into his blog, creating his own code, and promoting his message at conferences.

We have yet to see the final outcome of all this labor, but it’s an extremely strong start that leaves me optimistic about the future of Appfrica Labs and any other innovation hubs that pop up around Africa. Rebecca Wanjiku is right, Africans should stop whining and work smart, collectively to get new technology built, released and adopted throughout the continent.

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