I’m happy to report the release of a new report that comes our of a multi-year project to student the Internet and the Business Process Outsourcing sector in East Africa. This work has, in many ways, informed the research design and framing of our current Geonet project. Mann, L., Graham, M. and Friederici, N. 2015.… Read More »
I am very happy to announce a new paper: ‘Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya’s Outsourcing Sector.’ A pre-print is available below. Graham, M. 2015. Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya’s Outsourcing Sector. Environment and Planning A. (in press). Abstract East Africa has traditionally been characterised by stark barriers to… Read More »
The publisher has kindly allowed us to freely share three chapters of our new book (that I co-wrote with colleagues Dan Hammett and Chasca Twyman): ‘Research and Fieldwork in Development.‘ The book draws on our experiences of doing fieldwork about development and explores both traditional and cutting edge research methods, from interviews and ethnography to… Read More »
During the interviews I conducted in Zimbabwe last October, many participants asked me: “Why pick Harare as a case study? Why not Nairobi or Lagos?” Indeed, Harare’s “ecosystem” is nascent, and the few tech startups that exist are hampered by fundamental market and skill constraints, as discussed in my last post. At the same time,… Read More »
Click here to view this post as it originally appeared on VC4Africa. We all know that early monetization and revenue generation are crucial for digital startups in Africa. Entrepreneurs in pretty much any African city find it impossible to obtain significant scaling capital before they show revenue, as angel investors (if they exist at… Read More »
Tech entrepreneurship is definitely on the rise in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, actually, this rise is not evenly distributed across Africa’s vast geography. Leaving aside South Africa, we can observe that the emergence of content and application startup activity has so far concentrated in the sprawling capital cities of two countries with growing economies, large populations,… Read More »
The first stage of the Geonet project aiming to broadly understand the diversity of new practices in Sub-Saharan Africa’s knowledge economy is off to a good start. Beyond collecting data about the quaternary sector, IT-enabled services, and knowledge production in the region, we have started drafting the first articles. We will start by reviewing the… Read More »
“Ecosystem” has become one of the most common terms in tech innovation. It rolls easily off the tongue, probably because it has a communal connotation, and evokes ideas such as “collaboration” and “multi-stakeholder.” Where “innovation system” sounds like a technocratic term that emphasizes institutions and deemphasizes people’s agency at the grassroots, “ecosystem” sounds like a… Read More »
If you go to Rwanda and you’re interested in ICT and tech, chances are, you will soon pass through kLab, Kigali’s tech innovation hub. And so it was for me two months ago, when I started data collection for my research on innovation networks in Sub-Saharan Africa. I had a clear strategy: Through interviews, I… Read More »
New article examining historical and contemporary expectations of connectivity in East Africa