Postma: Africa Online - a continent on the move

So what our report clearly shows and a recent study, is that Africa is caught in, what we said before, this negative bias about AIDS, war, famine. It's caught in this negative mental poverty trap, as well as a physical poverty trap. But what mobile telephony, for example, does and the new creation of Internet and mobile banking is that it's creating an opportunity to be lifted for a short moment and a certain part out of these poverty traps. Specifically the mental poverty trap. Because people can become more efficient and more effective. The industry, the ICT industry itself brings new jobs to the continent. It creates more transparency. For example, a little farmer was totally dependent on what the big intermediary would dictate him as a price and those intermediaries were of course a big part of the modern economy sometimes even owned by the West. But now the farmers have, let's say, one of their friends on the market and they directly call to the farmers: 'This is the real price which they sell the crop for on the market.' This really breaks the traditional model where people in rural areas had no access to information. I think this is a clear example where you see there is a negative bias and there is a lot of good stuff happening on the African continent. The people themselves tend to be caught also in a mental poverty trap, but this new technology not just gives hope, but just gives them tools to make a better living. But, because there's a big but. I think ICT can help the African continent to grow, to become more autonomous as a region and between several regions within Africa. But Africa will need to invest in true old-fashioned infrastructure, like harbors and rivers which fit a boat, good road infrastructure, trains, continental flight, electricity plans. And that's the weirdest thing. If one wants to buy a nuclear plant there is a global market for capital to be required to build a nuclear plant. Because whether you build a nuclear plant in France or Africa, it's not that different. So there's a big financial market for that kind of infrastructure. There's also now a big financial market for micro credits. So if one wants to buy, for example, a sewing machine or to invest in his little shop, there's a big financial market for micro credits. Which is just an aggregation of a huge amount of people with small credit, so it's a statistical game. Both can be run from the West. But if Africa really wants to grow and to take a huge benefit of this moment of ICT which helps them to lift themselves a bit out of the mental and physical poverty trap, it needs investment in hardcore infrastructure, but it also needs investment in the middle field. So where you have macro finance for a nuclear plant, you have micro finance for the little entrepreneurs, you need mass capital. And mass capital is the investment in factories, in jobs, in the entrepreneurs to grow into, let's say, a truly middle-class and middle-economy. So I think our conclusion is: pay attention to the negative bias. It's not all positive, but it's also not all negative. Secondly, make a distinction between the physical and the mental poverty trap. And by transforming from raid to aid and now trade, and by implementing new technologies, the Africans themselves, the new Cheetah generation, their very well performing universities, new pragmatic leadership, new trade partners like India, Brazil and China should help Africa to become more independent and connected in the world economy. But they can only do it because they are at a very early stage, if we in the west keep investing specifically in hardcore infrastructure.