The Immense African Tech Advantage – Part 2

First of, if you haven’t read Part 1 of this article, you can go here now to read it.

In my first book “Money in The Net” (which never got published and the manuscript to which was lost by a typist) I outlined the possibilities that lay in store for the entrepreneurial on the net.

Without being told, I knew that notwithstanding the infrastructural deficit, what happened in the West, was bound to happen in West Africa. It was to me like a tsunami happening far away in the ocean, but which was unavoidable destined for land.

A tsunami, albeit a good one.

One of the downsides of being a trailblazer is the exposure to all the unknown dangers associated with blazing the unknown trail. Eventually, the world learns of all the dangers and how to mitigate or subdue them, but trailblazers often suffer the misfortune of being the sacrificial guinea pigs by which the rest of the world learns the dynamics of the new trail.

Such was the benefit the African entrepreneur had, that by virtue of the bloodbath of the dot-com bubble, and the internet tech industry that emerged from the debris of that bubble, the first world had inevitably thoroughly played the role of trailblazer (in other words guinea pig) for the rest of the emerging markets around the world.

Billions of dollars lost, billions of dollars made, results of inadvertent R&D done and presented in the form of all the companies dead and alive that emerged out of the fray of the dotcom rush and bubble.

Mass human behavioural responses to different tech-business dynamics had gracefully been established.

Indeed it was (and upon closer look still is) like having a one-hour time lag between the start and finish of a football match in two different parts of the world. The results of the match will always be known an hour before time in the latter part of the world.

That my friend, is the really unfair advantage the African tech space has had over the rest of the world within the scope of regional business.

All that needed to be done was to prepare for the inevitable wave and ride it to glory. I mean prepare for the wave of internet penetration, because, with increased internet penetration, you have an increased mass of connected users and…

…mass human behavioural responses to different tech offerings have already been established.

This has been one of the reasons behind the emergence of billion dollar and multi-million dollar tech companies (like PayStack, InterSwitch, FlutterWave) in West Africa. Proven services were provided to the emerging mass with little or zero competition.

Now while it is true that first-world big brands like Google, Facebook, Tiktok, YouTube, and the like enjoy global domination, truly dominating even within the African market just as successful African start-ups have done, massive opportunities still lie within the African internet tech space in the form of services less popular than the apparent spaces like FinTech and Social Media.

Perhaps studying businesses in the lower 8-digit and 7-digit valuation categories will provide insight into untapped emerging markets within our continually emerging African market, just as Toyin Omotosho identified and cracked open the African Affiliate Marketing niche with Expertnaire, the first Clickbank service for African vendors and affiliate marketers.

I know this to be the case because as Dr. Charles Dimnwaobi. of the Everyday Group said in an interview years ago, “There are gaps in the market and markets in the gap”.