Recently, Google put on the hyped G-Nigeria Day, which was actually a 3-day Google-fest in Lagos. Reading the impressions others had about the event was telling - most Nigerians seemed to be ambivalent about its worthiness to their efforts.

Yet Oladejo Fabolude over at Digital Crossings seems to have found the real essence of the event in his post I Went For Google’s G-Nigeria Day And All I Got Was A Lousy T-Shirt:

What Google need to take away from this experiment, get a bunch of techies into a room, provide Wi-Fi, provide them a little prodding to get them headed where you want them to go, move out of the way and watch them at work. Kind of like the Indian experiment that put a computer in a wall and just let street children do what they wanted – with amazing results.

From that event, I got to meet several Nigerian tech bloggers, exchanged a couple of phone numbers, blog addresses, followed and was followed by some more people on Twitter. I got a few answers to some tech issues from the audience and had some deficiencies about my blog pointed out. In order words, I connected with people – and that was the success of G-Nigeria Day. That was just me, I could see many other people connecting much better with the Google personnel and each other.

And that's the brilliance of Google's efforts in Africa - get ICT implementers together where they can talk about technologies and methodologies, give everyone access to them, and build relationships with people creating solutions.

Now I hope they capitalize on the Nigerian enthusiasm, before Ghana lives up to its title as the ICT hub of West Africa.

How is this for the power of Nigeria's blogsphere: Uche Eze, the blogger behind the popular entertainment blog, Bella Naija has made the leap to the big leagues. She was just featured on the Oprah Winfrey show's Beauty Around the World.

Uche Eze's skype interview

Here's her words on the experience:

Finally, our segment – I talked about how beauty goes along with brains in Nigeria – as in – a woman should be educated and driven, I talked about Ankara, aso-ebi, the shift in body image, healthy eating, current beauty trends (Brazilian hair, Indian hair etc..LOL) some parts of the segment have to be edited so not sure what will be shown – I was too excited to take note! I then chatted with Oprah on Skype. Her main question was about women’s body image in Nigeria.



I am so grateful for this experience. It’s so hard for me to write anything personal because that is just not me. However, I really hope this encourages any and everyone because no dream or aspiration is beyond actualization. I strongly believe in speaking positive things. I always tell myself “From our lips to God’s ears”.

Hat tip to Web Trends Nigeria for the link

Nigeria is a country of over 150 million people, located in sub-Saharan Africa and one of the fasted growing telecom market in the world. Let’s me take you through the emergence of the internet market in Nigeria, the potential, and how to tap into it.

Exploring the potential

The US is a model of what internet market can become in any part of the world, the way it transformed the economy, created young billionaires and disrupted industry to create seamless market for every available product.

Now the power is shifting away from US as emerging markets are beginning to understand the impact of the internet to economic development. It is good to note that China recently overtook the US in terms of internet users, and top technology and web companies are rushing to China to tap from the potentials.

Nigeria, being an emerging market is also a big market for those who can see it now! With over 11 million internet users and massive social media adoption, the Nigerian internet market is growing heavily.

What is obtainable now…

A recent webtrendsng.com report of the Nigeria internet market found news websites are the most visited in Nigeria followed by forum, jobs, portals and the banking sector websites. As the industry grows, there are a lot of vacuum to be filled, this ranges from payment system, local content, local social networks and advertising platform. The world's leading sites still dominate the local market as only one Nigerian site is among the top-ten websites visited by Nigerians (according to Alexa ranking).

This graph looks at the most active websites by industry in the Nigerian Internet Market in 2009. The lower the rank the higher the possibilities of untapped potentials, read full report here (PDF).

Gaining insight to tap the market

As I recently commented about the lack of understanding of the Nigerian internet market by investors as the limiting factor to tapping the goldmine. Around the globe, the internet market was stimulated by synergy of technologist and investors. Same could be applied here in Nigeria! There are number of sites that discusses the Nigerian internet market and the growing trends; some of which includes; webtrendsng.com, technologytimes.com.ng, startupsnigeria.org, and nairaland.com amongst others.

Nigerian technologist and thought leaders have been taking the evangelism of the potential of the market plus their innovations to investors. This is to intimate them about their products and market values they have. Google has identified the importance of the Nigerian internet market and will be organizing an event a week from now, to bring the technologist together, teach them about their technologies and education internet markets about Google products. It also planned invite VCs to meet up with technologist at the event

Events around the internet market this year;

1. Google Day Nigeria: A Google sponsored event to be held this February between 18th and 20th in University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos Nigeria.
2. Technology Outlook: An annual event organized by Technology times Magazine to bring industry leaders, bank managers, Government officials and technologist together to chart the course for the industry. This year’s event is significant as for the first time since its inception there will be a session for Web 2.0. This will enable Nigerian web technologists to meet with and take their messages to investors in the country. The event will be holding from 23rd – 25th of February 2010.
3. Barcamp Nigeria 2010: An “unconferenced” event organized by technologist for technologist. This event was started last year and brought technologist around the country together to share their experiences and passion for the development of the industry. This year’s event will come up around May 2010 with the theme “Creating local content for Nigerian web market”.
4. Nigerian Web Conference: The event is a brainchild of forum members on Nairaland.com, the forum that have been the most interactive and most visited Nigerian site for more than 4 years. The event also plans to bring developers together for networking and business development.
5. Nigerian Web Strategies Summit: This event plans to educate the corporate organizations about the importance of internet to their businesses and how they can explore the possibilities of the medium. One of the challenges faced by companies in Nigeria is the fact that they don’t know what the internet can do for them hence most have refused to increase their spending on internet marketing. It will also bring together solution providers in the industry to meet with their target market for business development. It is schedule to hold between August and September 2010.

The highlighted events are the ones announced so far and many more are yet to be announced. For anyone willing to tap into the Nigerian internet market, these events are must attend as it will give room for networking with innovators and movers in the industry.

What does the future hold?

As stated earlier, Nigerian internet population currently stands at 11 million, while telephone users are well above 70 million. CIA Factbook reported about 68% literacy rate in Nigeria, this is about 102 million available market, representing just the literate population of the country. The question now remains who will tap the remaining 91 million Nigerians that are yet to come online?

It is also good to note the penetration of mobile phones in the country; given the advancement in web technologies, the web is shifting to mobile so before the remaining populations are covered, mobile internet will be very instrumental to anyone willing to explore in the country.

The Nigerian internet market is a goldmine waiting to be tapped, the development around the country is pointing to the right direction, before it becomes saturated, why not get connected to the market to harvest the fortune?

What are you seeing in the Nigerian internet market? Do you think the time is now? Or what problem do you think needs urgent solution to harness the potential?

Shittu Sheriff, better know as Possicon is the founder of webtrendsng.com.

TechTrends Nigeria has an interesting article on the Internet-based technology trends that will impact Nigerian businesses in 2010. The ones they list are:

1. Increased Internet Access
2. Growth of Web based Applications
3. Web 2.0 in Nigeria
4. Mobile Web
5. Online Video/Internet TV
6. International Web Market
7. Websites as Web Services

What do you think of their list? Are these really all the Internet trends that Nigerian businesses should look for? And which ones will have the most impact?

Read the original post here.

It’s that time of the year when any expert worth their salt makes some predictions for the New Year. I too couldn’t resist a peek into my crystal ball and here I share what I believe will be the major ICT trends and some of the countries to watch this year. In general, 2010 promises to be an exciting and important year for ICTs in Africa despite the fact that the global financial situation is still uncertain.

Mobile commerce

First off, after hugely successful trials and implementations of m-banking in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana and South Africa in 2009, this year is set to witness m-banking implementations in almost every African country. As m-banking grows, we should expect to see m-commerce in general take off quite rapidly with buying and selling of goods and services on mobile platforms becoming quite wide spread. I suspect that this will impact the business and economic landscape quite dramatically in many countries creating new jobs, innovations and investments.

M-commerce will grow along with e-commerce fueled in part by substantial deployments of 3G broadband services by mobile telephone operators. These 3G deployments coupled with significant terrestrial and submarine fiber deployments underway and/or planned for commissioning in 2010 all over the continent will see the number of broadband connections more than triple this year. African governments will meanwhile reap billions of dollars as they sell 3G licenses to existing and new entrants into the telecommunications sector.

Mobile phone options

Gather Data mHealth solution

Competition among the mobile service providers in many countries is set to heat up considerably, driven by two major factors: an increase in the number of providers in many countries as governments move to issue more licenses and the adoption of number portability. A few studies conducted in countries like Uganda fairly recently suggest that users are locked into particular providers, despite poor service, because they would not like to change their phone number which is currently the case if they moved to another service provider.

With number portability, these users will be able to migrate to rival or alternate service providers with their existing telephone numbers. The introduction of number portability is therefore likely to threaten the bigger players while benefiting smaller players and new entrants. But analysts who follow these things agree that the bigger players will take steps to retain their customers. Either way, consumers will be the winners as quality of service is likely to improve and costs will continue to fall.

It’s also likely that we shall see some major mergers and acquisitions in the mobile and fixed telecoms industry as major global players in this field angle to take a slice of the growing African telecommunications market. The increased number of broadband connections and lower prices will also lead to increased sales of smart phones and computers. I suspect that the major computer manufacturers will release low priced computers targeted at the African market. These are likely to be a cross between netbook type PCs and smart phones.

More bandwidth brings opportunities

As access to the internet improves and costs drop dramatically due to increased competition, the nascent Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector in countries like Kenya and Senegal is likely to take off. Governments are also trying to stimulate this sector with various policy and regulatory sweeteners and stimuli thus making it a sector to watch carefully in 2010.

As intra-country connectivity improves, there is going to be a greater demand for local content in local languages and locally designed applications that fit the context of the different countries. Expect to see a dramatic growth of the software industry in the big markets targeting mobile phone applications. Those who have lamented the lack of African content might be in for a pleasant surprise starting this year.

Government regulation

Can't wait to know you

This year is likely to see some governments move to gain tighter control of and regulate ICT services especially as it becomes clearer that ICTs empower citizens to access information almost instantly, increase demand for accountability, make it harder to hide or gloss over human rights abuses, promote freedom of speech and strengthen political organization. Most countries taking these steps to muzzle or regulate ICT services will do so in the name of national security or fighting terrorism.

This desire to control ICT services will see a big push for SIM card registration (at the moment, one doesn’t need to identify themselves to purchase mobile phone SIM cards in most African countries) which on its own has merits, enactment of “wire-tapping” and other laws restricting broadcast media and in some cases increased censorship of internet, mobile and traditional broadcast content. This is likely to be a year where democracy and human rights activities will join hands with ICT companies to push back against what they will see as government interference in the market.

However, governments will be caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand, they would like to exercise control and on the other hand, the ICT sector is becoming a key sector of the economy accounting for a growing and significant portion of GDP and tax revenues as a result of deregulation, liberalization and reduced government control. This is therefore a year where governments will play a high-wire act to ensure that they don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg while angling to gain more control.

Countries to watch

Kenya
Kenya is my number one country to watch this year because of four important factors: its early and leading adoption of m-commerce, large investments in terrestrial and submarine fibre, the government’s strategy to grow the BPO sector and lastly the position of Nairobi as the “unofficial” business capital of the East African Community’s common market. These four factors are likely to lead to increased ICT investment flows into Kenya, decent growth in the ICT sector and a shakeup in the economy as m-commerce and e-commerce take root.

Rwanda
Rwanda is probably the only developing country that has staked its future on ICTs with an ICT-led economic development strategy. Rwanda remains among my top countries to watch on the ICT scene in Africa. The government has done a few things right such as promoting an investor-attractive environment, emphasizing and supporting ICT, Science and Technology education and investing in broadband infrastructure. Rwanda also has one of the most impressive ICT public awareness campaigns, and investment promotion regimes in place.

While in the past, there was a difference between government rhetoric and reality on the ground mainly due to limited human capacity and cautious moves from investors still associating the country with the Genocide, expect that gap to narrow as all of the government policies and interventions in infrastructure, science and technology education, investment policy and regulatory reforms in the last 5-10 years begin to bear fruit. It is not far stretched to expect to see local, regional and international ICT companies set up shop in Rwanda as a base to exploit the East African Common Market and Kigali take on the Silicon Valley status of Africa.

Ethiopia
Still in East Africa, Ethiopia is another country worth watching. Ethiopia still retains state control on the telecommunications sector with a monopoly state-owned telecommunications company. The government has always argued that it preferred to follow a slow and carefully thought out deregulation path instead of rushing to implement a free and open market. This may be the year when we see concrete moves to open up this space. If this happened, Ethiopia with its 80 million plus population would herald a gold rush for ICT and especially telecommunication companies into the country.

Look to Nigeria for change

Nigeria
Nigeria, often touted to as the “power house” of Africa, has in the last few years shocked the continent with an aggressive drive by its movie, banking and insurance industry to expand to the rest of the continent.

Already, Nigerian movies are by many accounts more popular than anything Hollywood could throw up in Africa and this is a trend that will continue to grow. Expect Nigerian ICT companies to begin to play a more prominent role in Africa with some of their top ICT companies already spreading their tentacles into the bigger markets in Africa. It is not too far stretched to imagine that 2010 may herald the emergence of an African ICT giant from Nigeria.

On the national scene, there are at least two submarine cables expected to land off the coast of Nigeria this year and massive fibre deployments underway in the country by the major telecommunication companies. The increased connectivity and lower prices are likely to give a tremendous boost to the nascent but impressive e-commerce sector in Nigeria.

South Africa
South Africa has made massive investments in ICT infrastructure in preparation for the World Cup which it hosts in June of this year. This investment will leave the country with one of the most developed ICT infrastructures among emerging economies in the world. This investment is likely to give the ICT sector a good boost.

Recent news coming of South Africa where foreign investments in the telecommunications sector have been blocked because of a government policy on foreign ownership restrictions in the telecommunications sector is likely to pit South Africa against other countries like Nigeria whose companies are seeking to expand into the rest of the continent. This government policy is also likely to place South African telecommunication companies that command a significant share of the sector in many other countries in Africa in an awkward place especially if the other countries enact retaliatory policies.

Senegal
Lastly, Senegal is a country that has made tremendous gains in the ICT industry in the last few years. Sonatel, the former state owned telecommunications companies now majority owned by France Telecom represents a rare breed of a former state-owned telecom company that has managed to transform itself into a viable and aggressive market player. Senegal has also positioned itself as the ICT Hub for West Africa with Sonatel building infrastructure into all its neighbours. This year, expect to see Senegal secure its position as the ICT Hub of French-speaking West Africa and a growth of the nascent BPO sector.

Alex Twinomugisha's Africa ICT Trends and Countries to Watch in 2010 is republished here with his permission

I hear much talk about how the Nigerian information and communication technology industry is the 2nd largest industry in Nigeria, right behind Oil and Gas, but I don't believe it. Why? Because if ICT were really such a large part of Nigerian economy, we'd hear about a thriving venture capital community that's support it.

Who is investing in ICT?

Who are the Nigerian Venture Capitalists?

Recently on the Naija IT Professionals newsgroup, we were presented with a list of Nigerian venture capital companies. But in researching the VC's Internet footprint, I only found these to be viable organizations:

• African Capital Alliance
• Bank of Industry, Nigeria
• Areos Capital
• First Funds
• AfriCap
• AfricInvest
• Unique Venture Capital

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Do any Nigerian Venture Capitalists focus on ICT?

One key aspect of Silicon Valley's dominance of the ICT sector, in everything from hardware, to software, to services, is the tight interplay between VC's and the surrounding technology companies. VC's provide the rick and patient capital that helps two college students go from garage fiddling to Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

Yet, if we look at the Nigerian ICT landscape, there are few, if any standout VC's. I checked each organization's portfolio from those listed above, I didn't see a focus on the ICT industry, or even the mention of ICT company investments.

No VC's? Then no large-scale ICT industry

Now why does this matter? Couldn't the Nigerian government, funders of some much else, also become the venture capitalists? As Paul Graham notes in his How to Be Silicon Valley post, VC's do matter more than government:

Do you really need the rich people? Wouldn't it work to have the government invest in the nerds? No, it would not. Startup investors are a distinct type of rich people. They tend to have a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. This (a) helps them pick the right startups, and (b) means they can supply advice and connections as well as money. And the fact that they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention.

Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort of people from startup investors. The idea of them making startup investments is comic. It would be like mathematicians running Vogue-- or perhaps more accurately, Vogue editors running a math journal.

So in the end, I don't believe that ICT is the 2nd largest in Nigeria. If there are no high-profile VC's, there can't be the Silicon Valley that can spawn a sizable technology ecosystem. In fact, how can Nigeria's technology industry be of any decent size when the World bank says that Sudan and Zimbabwe have higher Internet penetration than Nigeria?

If you want to send computers or other technology hardware to Africa, how do you do it? You can't just walk down the to Post Office and put a stamp on the outside of the computer box and mail it to Nigeria. Okay, so you could, but you'd have many problems.

First, your package might make it to a regional post office in the country, but it would take ages and when it arrived, the recipient would have to pay whatever customs and duties the local postmaster thought was due on the equipment. That might work for a random present, but isn't the best way to ship equipment to Africa.

At Inveneo, we've learned the hard way that getting information and communication technology equipment to different countries in Africa can be a challenge, but there is a method to the freight forwarder madness. By using tools like a Shipper's Letter of Instruction, in addition to the Commercial Invoice, and requiring a Form M for Nigerian shipments, we've made the shipment of technology equipment to Africa an easy process.

And we've even made a video to explain the process:

Like Glenn Stewart and Colm Pelow say, the equipment goes via air freight, riding in the same planes that haul people from the USA to Africa. But unlike your luggage, air freight cargo doesn't get delivered to the Arrivals baggage claim at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. It goes to the customs clearinghouse for review and import duty payment. From there, a local shipping agent can retrieve your equipment and have it delivered to the implementation site.

But why worry about all this hassle? Work with an Inveneo Certified ICT Partner, and focus on your implementation, not equipment importation.

Learn more about shipping - subscribe to ICTworks via RSS, Email, Twitter, or Facebook

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Back in the day, the Digital Divide Network was a great listserv resource for ICT knowledge sharing. But since its demise, I've been lost without a good mailing list around information and communication technologies for development - especially one that's focused on African issues.

The best I've found (and that's not saying much) is Naija IT Professionals, which focuses on Nigerian issues. But there should be similar listserv's for Kenya, Ghana, and pretty much any country in Africa.

Where are they? I've looked through Google Groups and Yahoo Groups and not really found a quality mailing list.

Do you know of any good ones?

If you're an expert in information and communication technologies in Kenya, Nigeria, or Ghana, and looking for a new job, where do you find employment opportunities?

I was wondering this as I read about Jobberman, which Techmasi says is a Nigerian job site with promise. Yet it only has 20 new jobs in the last 7 days, none of them in the ICT field.

So if you're an telcom professional, where do you look for work? Do you really use the Internet? If so, which job boards work the best? Here is a few I've found, with my impressions of them. A motley lot for sure.

Kenya

• BrigherMonday: with 7 information technology jobs, its actually one of the better job boards
• BestJobsKenya: is another good employment site with quality opportunities and direct emails to employers
• White African Job Board: started as a response to the lack of tech-focused job boards, its the one job board I've used to hire a techie

Nigeria

• Nariland: while not a employment site, specificlly, its the largest forum in Nigeria and its job section rocks
• Jobberman: as I mentioned before, it has some jobs but few in the ICT field. I include it in hopes it will grow
• NaijaHotJobs: is a forum filled with job opportunities mixed with IT support requests, get rich quick schemes, and other chaff
• CareersNigeria: looks all swank, but the job selection is pretty thin - only 3 in the ICT field

Ghana

• BusinessGhana: is impressive - the most number of current jobs of any job site I found
• And that's it - Ghana seems to be lacking in the online job board front - or BusinessGhana owns the field

Does this selection mean that most people find employment through newspapers and personal connections, not online? If so, here is another African business opportunity for the right entrepreneur.

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Thinking about all the industries in Nigera, from Oild and Gas to Transportation or Power Generation, would you agree with Mr. Patrick Obia, when he says that Information and Communication Technology is the second largest industry in Nigeria closely following the Oil and Gas industry?

This is the 2nd largest industry?

Mr. Patrick Obia, Head, Marketing/Strategy Follytox NetSystems Limited, said ICT took the second position among other various industries because communication remained an essential and integral part of life.

Mr. Obia made these comments as Chairman of the Second Annual ICT Empowerment Workshop and Quiz Competition, 2009 for Secondary Schools in Lagos State, organised by Fresh Brain Komputers, as recorded by The Guardian, but its hard for me to believe.

Not when the World bank says that Sudan and Zimbabwe have higher Internet penetration than Nigeria.

Now there might be a 1.3 trillion Naira opportunity with Naija code, but that has to be less than the national agriculture output.

Or am I missing something?

What do you think? Can ICT really be the #2 industry in Nigeria?