African Entrepreneurship

Article

Writing in the ACM magazine Interactions, researcher Nathan Eagle of the MIT Design Laboratory describes a surge of investor interest in Africa’s telecommunications infrastructure, comparing it to the entrepreneurial energy of Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. Drawing on his own experience living and working in a small Kenyan coastal town, Eagle argues that Africa’s more than 100 million mobile subscribers are repurposing phones as substitutes for missing infrastructure — from MP3 players to credit cards — and questions whether the applications being built for African handsets, often designed by engineers far removed from local needs, really reflect what users want.