Access to the Net in Somalia

Here’s a fascinating take on the digital scene in Mogadishu, with a clear picture of a country that may be in the midst of digital divide, but not the sort which arrogant Americans envision:

When it comes to electricity, Africa remains the dark continent. There are a billion Africans, and they use only 4% of the world’s electricity. Most of that is round the edges, in Egypt, the Maghreb and South Africa. The rest of Africa is unlit; seen from space, the Congo River basin is as dark as the Southern Ocean. Demand for power is already outpacing economic growth. With its population expected to double to 2 billion by 2050, Africa will have to build entire new power grids just to stand still. So far, the failure has been systematic: of Nigeria’s 79 power stations, only 17 are working. All of this increases political risk. Some African countries could collapse by 2020 unless they can power an industrial base. Yet Africa’s virtual future is not dependent on its physical future. You don’t need much electricity to run a phone network. You need even less to run a phone itself. Even the scabbiest African village has worked out how to charge mobiles and other devices using car batteries, bicycles and solar panels. Connectivity is a given: it is coming and happening and spreading in Africa whether or not factories get built or young people find jobs. Culture is being formed online as well as on the street: for the foreseeable future, the African voice is going to get louder, while the voice of ageing Europe quietens.

And then this, about facebook:

There are already 84m internet-enabled mobiles in Africa. It is predicted that 69% of mobiles in Africa will have internet access by 2014. A week’s worth of data can be had for $3. That’s still too much for the majority of Africans, who earn less than $2 a day, but it seems a miracle to those who were shelling out $1,500 for a sim card in 1998. And the mobile web is a more potent communication tool than anything else in African history, because it is interactive, participatory, and to some degree democratic and anonymous. On the internet you can doubt, you can challenge, you can be openly gay, join the opposition or find fellow believers, and most of all you can be entertained and informed in those long hours in traffic jams or evenings in crowded rooms lit by a single bulb.

Three companies will dominate digital Africa for the next decade. The first is Facebook. This social network, born at Harvard and based in Palo Alto, California, is not just a skin on internet-enabled African mobiles, it is the skin. Pricing is driving its popularity. The site was zero-rated in 2010—that is, made almost free of data charges in several African markets (the bill is footed by Facebook, the network operators and the phone manufacturers). “The zero-rating of Facebook was the most significant tech story in Africa in 2010,” says Erik Hersman, who has two influential blogs, White African and Afrigadget. So while text messages are cheap, sitting on Facebook is even cheaper. Facebook’s own numbers show growth coming fastest in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.</blockquote>