GOOGLE COMES TO AFRICA!

Is Africa ready for Google?

Written by Al Kags

Wednesday, 13 June 2007

In a groundbreaking move, Google has employed its first African, Joseph Mucheru to help set up its Africa operations in Kenya. Clearly serious about setting up shop in Kenya, Google aims to achieve three things with the move: First, to optimise the use of its applications in Africa, to make Google maps (and earth, I believe) more useful in Africa and to work on Google advertising further to ensure that Google ads are better monetized in Africa. Mucheru: "Google understands that bandwith is an impediment and will purchase international bandwidth so that locals don't have to pay the current considerable premium they are." I should like to hear more about this for sure. Coupled with the fact that my favorite ministry, the Ministry of Information and Communications, headed by the indomitable duo, Mutahi Kagwe and Dr. Bitange Ndemo is working extra hard to get fribre optic connection in East Africa through Kenya by mid 2008, we are in for interesting times. However, we need to accept, Africa, that the largest impediment to our development is our cultural outlook - not the traditions and customs but the way we do business and our openness to new concepts. I recently had a meeting with a government official with regard to accessing some of the records that they have, digitizing it at my own cost and sharing the digital data with them for them to develop its use by wider sharing it. Amazingly, his first reaction was "absolutely not." Why? Because it is not done in government. When we got over that, we found that there is a huge fear with regard to what the information will be used for. The same is true for business leaders in Africa. Fears such as "if I have a blog and allow people a free hand to comment on my views, how can I protect myself?" My position is that you only need to protect yourself from obsene and crude remarks but not as a recent executive asked me, from critisism. In fact, if your staff thinks that you are afraid of critisism, then you need to actively change that. Of course information can be misused and so can the free use of applications such as the comments section of your blog. Of course a nicely elaborate Google Maps and Google Earth can be misused by say, terrorists. But then, that cannot stop us from developing. Cars can be used as getaway cars in bank robberies and the like, but that does not stop us from developing them? If your business is to develop, then sharing information and interacting with a wide community is the way to build it in the new era. Its the only way to be ready for the likes of Google and Multiple Choices. This post was Originally blogged by Kenyaimagine and reblogged here by assidous.