Why “Internet of Things” matters for Africa
How I came to learn about IoT?
I remember when I first saw the term “Internet of Things.” It was April 2011 in Shanghai, China. I was there on a graduate school trip. It was early morning, after a late night of dancing. Two friends and I were desperately looking for a coffee. We walked past a large poster for an “Internet of Things China” conference (photo evidence below). I remember chuckling to myself about the term. I thought it was a slightly comical Chinese translation into English, a way of saying “lots of stuff on the Internet.” (Shame on me for being culturally insensitive and technologically ignorant!)
So, what is IoT?
Fast forward a few years, and Internet of Things (“IoT”) has become one of the great buzzwords of our age. It’s the technology that will “connect everything”: smart homes, smart factories, driverless cars. Put simply, the Internet of Things is the extension of Internet connectivity into physical devices and everyday objects, enabling data to be collected from these devices and instructions to be pushed out to these devices. It will be a $500B market by 2021, up from $235B in 2017. There are 12 billion connected things in use worldwide in 2018 (set to reach 20.4 billion by 2020). That’s 2 devices for every 1 person on earth today.
I hate buzzwords. And, yet, I get really jazzed about this one. Maybe it’s because IoT is where the physical and digital worlds meet. If deployed correctly, IoT should enable vast advancements in efficiency — conserving precious resources such as energy, water, and land.
Why it matters in Africa?
If you’re a Bay Area techie, maybe you think IoT is cool for its inherent technological advancement. Or maybe you just want to control your home thermostat and stereo from your smartphone. If you’re an environmentalist, you can see all the ways IoT can drive energy efficiency, improve precision agriculture, enable more sustainable cities. It you’re an African, you may see all this and much more.
Many markets and industries in Africa have inherent inefficiencies. Studies show that to meet the continent’s rising food demand local farmers will need to increase productivity by 70%. Water utilities in Kenya lose 31–85% of the water in their systems due to technical losses (leaking pipes) and economic losses (theft and inaccurate billing). Up to 85%!!! Affordable sensors and smart meters can now offer a cost-effective way to identify and drastically reduce these losses. There is a tremendous need to leapfrog in efficiency gains — for the sake of reducing poverty, for the sake of feeding the continent, for the sake of increasing environmental resilience, as Africa stands to be the continent most vulnerable to climate change.
One example of a fairly robust IoT deployment in Africa is the off-grid solar industry. Six hundred million Africans still lack access to modern electricity. A number of companies have emerged and spent the last decade trying to serve this vast population with distributed energy sources — solar home systems and mini-grids. Globally, between 2010 and 2017 an estimated 400 million people gained access to electricity from off-grid solar solutions. And these companies depend on a simple IoT application to run their business. In the case of many solar home systems and mini-grid meters, the equipment has a SIM card inside (the same type of SIM card that your smart phone uses). That SIM card communicates back to headquarters, enabling low-income households to pay for their solar energy daily or weekly and the company to shut off the system remotely, if a household doesn’t pay. These off-grid energy companies are using the ubiquitous cellular network (GSM) to manage a vast portfolio of 100,000s of products deployed in rural areas.
What am I doing in IoT?
I work for a pan-African technology company called Liquid Telecom. We operate across 13 African countries. We build the infrastructure that enables Africa’s digital future: we have the largest network of fiber optic cable, running Cape to Cairo; we are building out the continent’s first network of connected data centers to house Africa’s data (in Africa, instead of in Ireland, Ohio, or Dubai); and we are rolling out low-cost, low-power IoT networks.
Specifically in East Africa, Liquid is rolling out a low power wide area network (LPWAN), called Sigfox. Please forgive the acronym and unusual name. All you need to know is this is a wireless communication technology. It enables long-range data transmissions via radio frequency, at a very low cost and allowing devices to have very long battery life (5–10 years).
So, let’s talk about what this means in the real world. We have a bunch of early deployments in Kenya that I think are so cool. We’re tracking animals in Ol Pejeta wildlife conservancy to reduce poaching. We’re enabling an NGO called Code for Africa to measure Nairobi’s worsening air quality and expand to other East African cities. We’re enabling a local fish farm cooperative in Lake Kisumu to increase productivity by putting sensors in their fish ponds that measure temperature, pH levels, etc, so they can optimize their feeding regimes. We’re enabling smart car insurance through vehicle tracking. And, we’re in conversations with the big power and water utilities to roll out smart meters across their networks, reducing the loss of the country’s precious energy and water resources. What’s exciting about this technology is that our network will be a fraction of the cost and a much higher quality (in terms of successful data transmission) compared to the GSM networks I mentioned above.
So, why is it hard?
This is a vital technology for the African market. And the value and economics are compelling for so many uses. So, it should just take off, right? Like a rocket ship…
It’s just not that simple. There is lots of talk of technology revolutions in Africa, and I think IoT is a great case study on why it’s hard for new technologies to take off in Africa, and emerging markets more generally.
First, we’re building an ecosystem from scratch. This is not a, “If we build it, they will come.” scenario. We’re providing the network infrastructure — the base stations that will create a connectivity web reaching 85% of the Kenyan population in 2019. But, we need cost-effective devices to be available in the country. We need companies across a wide range of industries that understand how to use these devices and how to use the data generated. There is a huge education component to bringing a new technology to market — training device manufacturers, solutions providers, and customers. Any company that’s bringing a new technology to market here has to invest a lot more upfront in training and ecosystem building.
Second, often technologies that are made for the US and Europe need to be adapted for these markets. Take the hardware itself. Many of the smart meters and sensors manufactured in Europe can’t hack it in Africa. They aren’t designed for the tough environmental conditions or human interference. For example, before joining Liquid, I was working with an IoT start-up called KAIOTE that was doing a smart meter pilot with Malindi Water utility. The best meters KAIOTE identified came from Turkey and had all the important functionality for the best price. Only one problem: they were made of brass. What’s wrong with brass? It seems sturdy and robust. But, Malindi Water informed us that the brass would be stolen (because it has value and can be sold in the informal market), rendering the meter unusable. So, KAIOTE had to switch to a more expensive all-plastic water meter. These are nuances you might not encounter when building an IoT network in the US.
And, while some applicable devices can be found oversees, there’s another issue: these imported devices are expensive for the Kenyan market and have a long timeline for delivery, in part, because import duties and taxesare so high in many African countries. So, we are working with local contract manufacturing companies to build IoT devices in Kenya, which is no small feat.
Third, we need companies and institutions to use the data generated. We need applications that convert this onslaught of data into useful insights that enable farmers, government institutions, logistics companies, wildlife conservancies, and others to make smarter decisions. The backbone tools are available globally, but we need the local tech talent to move up the learning curve on data analytics and data science. While I’ve been so impressed by how the computer engineering talent is growing rapidly in the region, the local talent pool for specialized skills like data science is still shallow. That’s why we’re partnering with universities to develop IoT labs in Kenya.
Fourth, we have the realities of doing business in Africa that any company faces. A small example: We need to import the base station (imagine a very small telecom tower) from France. Our base stations were held up for weeks and weeks in the Kenyan customs department for bureaucratic reasons and, let’s be honest, because someone wanted a bribe, which we are unwilling to pay. Always. These frictions weigh down our ability to move quickly and deploy an important technology for this country. It’s frustrating and holds the back progress.
But, we persevere
It takes resilience and grit to deploy new technology here, as countless young Nairobi tech companies will tell you. It also takes shrewd focus. A company can waste a lot of money and time on scattered opportunities and pilots with little to show for it in the end. We need to demonstrate the value quickly. And, lastly, we need to make this a truly local technology and ecosystem — with local manufacturers that understand Kenyan realities and local data analysts building intuitive systems that allow Kenyan farmers or utility operators to make smarter decisions with their scarce resources.
