The Semacraft Blog

We left this till pretty late but here it is nonetheless; our predictions for which five trends will be big in East Africa this year.  Of course we are focusing on social business and innovation for the BoP so there’s no mention of how the referendum in Southern Sudan is going to go 🙂 Enough with the small talk, here we go:

1. Crowd-sourcing will be big. Ushahidi showed there’s latent crisis crowd-sourcing potential in Africa. Now it’s time for other sectors to embrace it. We see big growth in customer-facing organzations using crowdsourcing for customer support, ideation and marketing. I think local Q&A platforms like majibu.com as well as platforms like Ushahidi hold great promise. The challenge for organisations in the civil society sector is how to grow sustainable engagement  and penetration of their crowd-sourcing platforms, especially if they are using the Ushahidi platform.
2. Mobile will be bigger. It’s always big in Africa and most emerging markets so that’s a no-brainer. How will it be big in 2011? Apps. That’s how. We expect growth in text-based services but more growth in apps, especially J2ME apps for the lower-end devices. Some clever apps will emerge for the smartphones on Bada, S60, ^3, Android and iOS but S40 will still rule.
3. Social business will grow. The experimentation phase among the blue chip firms is ending and they will begin taking this space seriously. The large agencies with digital divisions have driven activity in social media for big brands so far. This might not change in 2011 although data from overseas suggests that multi-national corporations abroad are gravitating towards boutique firms. Challenges lie in listening, measuring and integrating engagement on social spaces with in-house infrastructure like CRM.
4. More money for tech businesses. The number of private equity funds focusing on East Africa has jumped tremendously over the last 24 months. Those targeting the lower tiers ($50,000 – $500,000 deals) have increased. I think this growth in attention to East Africa and specifically in technology businesses based here will represent the most activity in the private equity sector. How much money will eventually be disbursed is another matter. The number of technology businesses that can survive the due diligence process and get cash within 12 months may be extremely small due to the nature of the way they are run. Techies don’t always make great business people.
5. Network agnostic money services won’t fly very well. There are at least three network agnostic mobile money providers gearing up for launch within the next few months. Whereas the promise of true mobile money mobility across networks maybe attractive to some, the numbers may be too low to create a real opportunity any time soon.  Number portability may offer some help as users finally get the chance to migrate their numbers from one operator to another but there is no incentive for network operators to enable mobile money portability yet. For the majority, there needs to be a compelling case for network agnostic services and there is currently none.  That said, it is undeniable that their platforms are more highly advanced than what the network operators offer and this may also be their undoing.

The year is still young, there is yet still time for me to eat my words.

Happy new year. May your 2011 be full of pleasant surprises.

Related posts:

1. Improving Adoption of Innovation in Emerging Markets.