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Afrinnovator | June 20, 2013

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Capturing Imagination & Aspiration: How African Entrepreneurs Can Succeed in Tech Startups

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In our ongoing series of guest-posts from African writers, techies and bloggers, we kick things off with this piece by Muthoni Maingi. If you’d like to submit your guest post, send a draft to Afrinnovator [at] gmail [dot] com

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I am not the first to write about the seeming shortcomings that the African Internet tech scene is currently undergoing. A state in which many competent and talented coders, programmers and creatives with working products just aren’t making viable and sustainable profit.

There are of course many reasons as to why this happens, however, the biggest issue in my opinion is not a ‘bad’ product or poor usability for the good ones. It is the lack of products, solutions and innovations that capture the population’s imagination and aspiration.

To quote Jonathan Bhalla on a past Afrinnovator article:

“Technology – no matter how well designed – is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well intentioned people, then appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. Successful application of technology for development is seldom about the technology per se, but the way in which it is utilised by people and organisations to address specific development priorities.”
I interpret his statement as such, if your basis for developing a product/service is to:

  • Make money by aping a business model and product/service that succeeded elsewhere
  • Offer no other differentiation other than ‘this is the local version of …’

Updated: Then you have not really in true sense looked at the aspiration of your target market to create something that will not only capture their imagination, but also ‘amplify their capacity and lead them to amazing achievements’. As a result, your technology no matter how well designed, is a magnifier of your intent and capacity and you thereby reap the results you sowed.

Muthoni Maingi is a brand strategist with past experience in TV and an active blogger on vast topics. Her pet loves are internet tech, business and innovation.

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  1. February 22, 2011

    Reply
    Soud Hyder

    “It is the lack of products, solutions and innovations that capture the population’s imagination and aspiration.”

    I’d like to disagree with the statement, first and foremost Africa generally is a raw tech market, meaning even the most basic solutions should have a market. There are certain parts of Africa where literally putting out a tap and selling water in the streets will bring in a lot of money. It not that people are addressing the wrong problems, I believe the biggest fallback is the lack of thought and experience in business models, ‘go to market strategies’ and general business advisory as well as management. Poor policy on new and small businesses to support fledgling entrepreneurs doesn’t help as well.

    A good example is M-PESA, technically it scores lowest compared to competition i.e. Airtel, Orange & YU. They all have solutions that would capture the population’s imagination, yet M-PESA is quite simple, they started out addressing one problem, which was moving money from point A to point B which was a problem that was solved by Posta, Western Union e.t.c by Safaricom felt they could do it much better. Eventually it grew to the virtual proxy/faux bank that it is today. Why, they had an open business model that relies on agents, everyone had an incentive to make M-PESA work and it significantly reduced Safaricom’s operational burden if it were to operate these agent branches. So the service exploded and reached every corner of the country, people pay a premium to use M-PESA simply because it is convenient and it works.

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