BUISNESS AS USUAL: Is Nigeria lagging behind in African technology?

In the last few years, the African technology space has received increasing spotlight in the international press. Led by innovations in Kenya such as M-Pesa, the renowned mobile money platform and Ushahidi, the Kenyan crowd-sourcing platform that maps crisis information, the continent has received a slew of positive media spotlighting these technologies. This is welcome given the continent's prior problems with attracting negative press globally. The African ICT space appears to be one of the key sectors leading the rebranding of the continent as a place of opportunity and not solely of war, hunger and misery.

This is exciting and given the steady efforts at expanding broadband access in various countries, these positive ICT stories are likely to continue.

In the evolving narrative in the African ICT sector, certain trends appear to be emerging. As mentioned earlier, Kenya and particularly, Nairobi is becoming a hub for technological innovation. Its early successes appear to have piqued the interest of developers, entrepreneurs and corporations and set off what seems to be a culture of coders, technology entrepreneurs and innovators. Global technology companies like Google, Cisco and Nokia Siemens have set up shop in Nairobi as their continent-wide headquarters and the stage seems set for the churning out of Africa's next technology talents and startups from the city.

Similarly, South Africa appears to have steadily set itself apart as a leading African technology hub. It boasts of success stories such as MXit, a mobile social network that is currently more popular than Facebook among South Africans and upcoming technology platforms such as Motribe, another social network that boasts about 1.5 million users and growing.

However, South Africa's greatest value proposition to both entrepreneurs and corporations alike appears to be not so much its prior history of innovation but its rich intellectual capital. Cities such as Cape Town are home to world-class computer science faculties and have gradually developed an ecosystem of people, ideas and resources. Not surprisingly, Google recognised this rich evolving ecosystem when it set up Umbono, its first technology incubator globally in Cape Town to provide monetary and technical support for entrepreneurs earlier this year.

Collectively, the sorts of competencies that cities like Nairobi and Cape Town are developing are the kinds that matter. Features such as a strong community of innovators and a strong educational foundation that strengthens the quality of human capital ensure that startups that emerge have a greater likelihood of being world-class.

As Africa's leading Internet market (according to some industry reports), it is a bit surprising that Nigeria is not at the forefront of technological innovation on the continent. Though success stories in areas such as the transaction switching and payment processing space through companies such as Interswitch are present, follow up game changing innovations in other areas have been few and far between.

Earlier, the Nigerian Government set up the Abuja Technology Village, reported as modelled after Silicon Valley in the US. Although the technology village has been running since 2009, including its in-house incubation programme for entrepreneurs, called Enspire, it is not clear if the initiative has been able to spur the sort of community and vibrancy needed to position Abuja as a prominent technology hub.

In Lagos, some vision-driven private sector individuals are at the forefront of creating hubs that can foster the sort of community that have been developed in places like South Africa and Kenya. However, infrastructural challenges that significantly increase the cost of running these creative spaces remain an issue. There is also the problem of world-class human capital.

Is Nigeria lagging behind in African tech? Given the evolving trends, it appears we have some catching up to do.