I recently went travelled to my home country Uganda, and was pleasantly suprised at the increased number of home Internet connections, a phenomenon that would have been unheard of barely three years ago. At my parent’s house about 150 miles outside the capital, my Dad can now happily sending out E-mails and explore the web.

Echoing a social theorist whose name I forget, “With Technological progress follows Social Progress”. The adventurous and bright minds at Google are already thinking about the bigger picture. Hopefully the rest of the world will stop viewing Africa as a continent of despair, but one of opportunity.

Julius (www.fairviews.org)

anyway it means more development all around. N that dude who says he didn’t know we had computers. ignorant man, it turns out we do.

In Uganda, they will find a man who has overstayed his welcome as country’s president. In Kenya, Mwai Kibaki is clinging to power even after a clear sign fom the people they are fed up with hm.

Welcome to Africa!

Mutimba

that’s sounds like a good plan to me. technological innovation is great, but there’s a chance, just a chance, that social and societal innovation is better.

this is like saying the US shouldn’y spend on technology while there is recession, unemployment rising ( no matter what they tell you), healthcare problems soaring, and 2 billion dollars being spent every day to fight in Iraq.

You can see that it doesn’t work that way.

If you’re thinking that Google is moving faster into Africa just for what your concept of the internet is, you’re wrong there too. It’s about mobile phones and the long tail of the African market. There are more than 200 million mobile phones in Africa that few companies are paying any attention to. It’s Africa’s PC.

Yes, there is a market within urban areas for traditional web-based Google products, but this isn’t the main market in Africa.

Your comment that, “Africa remains the final frontier for internet growth” is true though. People are going to make millions of dollars there very soon, and the rest of the world will be surprised because they didn’t see it coming.

Although that’s a weird generalization to make, it relates to an important point in that the the innovation Google would bring is far in advance of the real needs of many Africans. I know there’s not a lot of business in it, but still, if the governments try to jump forward by spending money on internet technology before they focus on solving tribal/genocide/starvation/disease problems, the continent is not *really* going to benefit, only a tiny minority of people will.