Rebooting Africa and the Semacraft Team
We thought it was about time that we took a moment to share what has been happening here at Semacraft. Its been an exhilarating year and we’ve only reached the middle of March.
First, Semacraft Consulting Group was invited to write a series on Africa, with a particular focus on the contemporary tech sector by our good friend, Dirk Knemeyer of Involution Studios, Boston. We’ve published four articles already and here they are in order:
Africa: The Next Frontier published February 22nd, 2011
…analysis of GDP performance over the past decade shows that the fastest growth is coming from African nations and is expected to average 6-7% over the next five years
From OLPC to VC: Africa leapfrogs the digital divide published March 1st, 2011
Ultimately, the “Bangalore” of Africa that stakes a place on the world map may not be any single location but a wider community of individuals and businesses who refuse to allow lack of policies or resources to hold them back from achieving their wildest dreams.
Challenges present opportunities: innovation in Africa published March 8th, 2011
…it will be the entrepreneurs and the companies that see these challenges as opportunities for innovative services, business models and product lines that will succeed in the emerging markets of Africa.
Mobile in Africa: from SMS to Android published March 16th, 2011
The next phase of Africa’s digital age is going to be shaped by the software, the services and the content, not the hardware.
And its not just all about writing we should add. Our team has grown – we welcome Niti Bhan, founder of Emerging Futures Lab as Senior Partner, Global Insights to Semacraft Consulting Group. She brings over 20 years of experience in both emerging markets such as India’s, where she was on the team that launched Coca Cola in the market back in 1994, as well as developed ones like the United States, Finland and Singapore. Her multidisciplinary background in business, engineering and design gives her an edge when it comes to helping us craft effective strategies to reach the most challenging customers. Her intuitive sense of the market was demonstrated by her May 2007 keynote at the CHI conference in San Jose “The mobile as a post industrial platform for social and economic development for emerging markets and the bottom of the pyramid.”
We welcome her addition to our team and look forward to more innovation with meaning, perhaps on the mobile platform for the prepaid economy.
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