The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms
- Lao Tzu

Email and GSM constitute the most discernible proof of ICT4D within business communities, families and sundry social networks of sub-Saharan Africa. People now ask, “how the heck did we ever make it without email and (GSM) mobile phones all these years?"

This Gartner study illustrates just one aspect of the monumental transformations email has unleashed in the US business sector; the study surmises that email as a direct marketing tool alone, is taking over the $200 billion direct mail market; email-advertising revenue was forecasted to hit $1.5 billion in 2005 from $948 million in 2001. And another piece of evidence of email prowess in the US business arena is seen in this 2004 article; KeyCorp – a major financial services company, saved $15 million in the first year they implemented a digital check processing system; most of the savings were realized via elimination of microfilm, printing, handling and mailing of paper statements as well as all the manual processes involved. 

However, on the SSA front maybe with the exception of South Africa, getting exact statistics on economic and business improvement directly attributable to Email and GSM is a lot more daunting – nonetheless, grand impacts of email and mobile phones in the SSA entrepreneurial community can be illustrated in the aggressive growth spurts recently recorded in several SSA business avenues.  A good example is the international courier business; 7 to 10 years ago, air courier and freight delivery services to Africa was totally at the mercy of the big guns -- DHL, FEDEX, UPS, USPS, etc. However, with email and GSM proliferation in SSA, a rash of smaller, African-owned/operated airfreight service providers, brokers and forwarders have sprung up all around the US. If you’ve ever been anywhere around the Jamaica and Queens neighborhoods in New York lately (immediate business environs around the JFK airport,) you would observe a substantial African logistic-business presence. The Average transit time for airfreight originating from New York to most sub-Saharan African destinations is about a week, and these nimble African operators in New York are able to exchange freight and shipping information pretty quickly with their SSA-based counterparts via email, phone calls or text messages; 10 years ago, such volume of electronic correspondence would have swallowed all the profits and put these small operators out of business, and the scarcity of email, fax and phone amenities in SSA would have made it absolutely impossible to compete in the expedited freight and courier delivery arena.

Where Email and phones have somewhat leveled some significant impedances in the business playing field, there are still a lot of challenges; but the good news is there is a plethora of ICT applications with just as good or even better potential, waiting in the wings; take your pick from any of the following:

• Online file exchange:
  Offerings in this category (sendthisfile.com, sharebigfile.com, etc.,) allow you upload and store your personal files, in a wide range of sizes and formats – with more complex formats and larger files attracting more fees. Going all the way up to the Google desktop which basically gives you on an online portal everything Microsoft gives you on your PC or laptop desktop – there are speculations that the much touted, UN-backed $100 laptop concept borrows quite a bit from this model; the laptops will have a very simplistic operating system that supports internet access (or shared server,) where it can then tap into an online desktop portal.

• Virtual office services:
  Do not worry about renting an office (or offices) and hiring employees – there are tons of virtual office services out there that can give you an office address anywhere in the world without your physically being there, and may include receptionist service, virtual phone numbers for any country, etc – save you a lot of overhead. And if you must meet with clients physically – you could opt for an outsourced space on the fly. Virtual offices can go from $50 to $750.

• Bandwidth-on-demand:
  This concept lends itself well to lean small and medium enterprises; buying bandwidth only as you need it -- there could be tremendous cost-savings. There is the Afro-centric version and the larger-than-life version by Jeff Bezos.

• Virtual employment service:
  Some call it backdoor outsourcing, but computer nerds of all hues – East Europeans, Africans, Asians, etc are making some serious bucks via Odesk.com. Odesk connects employers (mostly in the US) with these less expensive techies from poorer nations, and provides monitoring/supervisory mechanisms. Payment is usually through paypal.

I could go on, the possibilities just blow my mind!

And quite analogous to phone and email, these apps make our world even smaller via virtual disintegration of geographical borders, class and creed differences – real or perceived; a Ghanaian Cocoa bean seller may have never gotten a closer look into the blue eyes of his European customer nor a Kenyan coffee farmer get fairer auction bids for his harvest from buyers spanning the globe, from Windhoek to Baku, Jalingo to Siam.

I wish it were all in place already. I wish I could no longer hear SSA entrepreneurs complain they are limited by their (SSA) location! But we still have other demons to deal with; cost of infrastructure and access, awareness, proficiency/skills development, building trust in the technology and its usage, security threats, reliability of service, etc. These handicaps, however atrocious, don’t diminish the dream! We are already operating in a fairly egalitarian global economic space.

So, what is the next Killer-App going to be for SSA?

It could be one ICT application by itself, or a combination of several or a combination of several apps amalgamated with some business model… who knows?

Please share your views and opinion with us.