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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
AFRICA’S SILICON VALLEYS
Several of the continent’s cities have established them-
selves as important tech hubs. Here are a few examples:NAIROBI
Startups in Kenya’s capital include AB3D, which
turns e-waste into 3D printers that make things like
prosthetic limbs; money transfer startup M-Pesa; and
crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi, which has been used
for election monitoring in India and Mexico. Google, IBM,
and Microsoft also have offices here.L A G O S
Africa’s biggest city is home to Nigeria’s online retailer
Jumia, Africa’s first tech company to hold an initial public
offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Nigerian pay-
ments service Interswitch and OPay, a Norwegian-owned
mobile payment service, are also headquartered here.C A P E T O WN
South Africa’s second-largest city has a diverse tech
industry, including Aerobotics, which makes drones
for farmers, and SweepSouth, an Uber for domestic
workers. It’s also where Naspers, a media- and tech-
investing giant that owns a major stake in Chinese tech
titan Tencent, is based.struction tool for unity,” says Paula Ingabire,
Rwanda’s tech minister.
Hamstrung by poverty and the legacies of
the slave trade and colonialism, Africa had,
until recently, been left largely behind by the
global tech boom. But increasingly, it’s having
success nurturing tech startups and attracting
major foreign tech companies.
In November, Visa invested $200 million in
Nigerian payments firm Interswitch at around
the same time that OPay, a Norwegian-owned
but Lagos-based mobile payment service, raised
$120 million from high-profile investors in-
cluding Sequoia Capital China and SoftBank
Ventures Asia. Meanwhile, in May, Micro-
soft opened offices in Kenya and Nigeria for
engineers working on artificial intelligence,
machine learning, and mixed reality. A month
earlier, Google opened an A.I. lab in Ghana.
In another sign of Africa’s growing tech
buzz, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and
payment-terminal maker Square, tweeted
in November that he would spend up to six
months in 2020 living on the continent. “Af-
rica will define the future,” he said.
Still, Africa’s growing tech scene remains
small and, in many ways, limited by some very
stark realities on the ground. Nearly 600 mil-
lion Africans lack electricity, including as
many as two-thirds of sub-Saharans, and 85%
of the continent’s residents live on less than
$5.50 a day.
Such challenges are compounded by the in-
evitable operational problems that all startups
face, regardless of their location. For example,
Nigerian online retailer Jumia Technologies,
which in April became Africa’s first tech com-
pany to hold an initial public offering on the
New York Stock Exchange, recently shuttered
its e-commerce operations in Tanzania and
Cameroon, along with its food delivery service
in Rwanda. As of mid-December, its shares
had plummeted nearly 87% from their peak.
On the bright side, access to venture capital
is growing. Investors poured $1.2 billion into
African startups in 2018, more than triple the
amount of two years earlier.
Of all the African countries pushing into
tech, Rwanda stands out. A hilly nation of
12 million that’s similar in size to Maryland,
its effort is centered on Kigali, named “world’s
cleanest city” by the World Economic Forum.
The drive has already attracted Co-Creation
Hub, a design lab from Lagos; Norrsken, a
coworking space and investment fund from
Stockholm; and Carnegie Mellon University,
which opened its campus for 300 graduate
CAPE TOW