Even though one may find it quite hard, let’s put aside economic factors for a moment when trying to understand Africa’s low degree of IT equipment and infrastructure to focus on another major factor: the dramatic number of languages in use on the African continent.

Over dinner yesterday with my fellow classmate and friend Booba, I had a chance to learn that 800 hundred languages were currently in use on the continent of Africa. 800 hundred languages! I guess people from Africa were very involved in the building of the Tower of Babel to be punished as such – as if their political, ethnical, religious, economic, social, institutional issues weren’t enough already. Unfortunately, it looks like the problem of the hen and the egg…

Anyways, although I generally tend to believe that cultural differences are a major asset in organizations, I think such a diversity represents a constraint to economic development in general (markets not unified by a least common denominator), and to information technology in particular.

As a matter of fact, in both software and hardware, localization of products is key to a fast development. IT is such a competitive market that companies either go global fast or die. What I mean by localization is: translation of a software, documentation, marketing packages, websites, support, contracts, etc. Localization is extremely resource-consuming in both time and money. When facing the decision of going to Africa or not, I pretty much understand fragile gazelles not to attack such a fragmented market. Only leading companies, like Microsoft (precedent link: a post on Microsoftie Lee Mungai’s blog) for instance, manage to make a real effort and translate their products in little spoken idioms.

Indeed, if Africa may be compared to India in terms of headcount and number of dialects spoken by the population, any company would pretty much manage with Hindi and English when starting to market its products in India whilst making a decision as far as the continent of Africa is concerned would be impossible. To consider one only of Africa’s 61 territories: Senegal accounts 10 million inhabitants who spoke in total about 35 languages. Although mass media advertising is broadcast or published in Wolof and French, it doesn’t reach the entire population for mutual understanding, language reasons. So, IT companies tend to procrastinate when the time to invest comes – hence slowing down Africa’s economic development and increasing the digital gap between OECD countries and the rest of the world. But who is to blame? Certainly not IT companies who struggle for life in their early days and watch for disruptive newcomers when slowing down the pace. And definitely not any authority anywhere either…

As a conclusion, I’d like to draw a parallelism between Africa vs. India and the EU vs. the USA. Okay, an IT start up is likely to grow much faster in the beginning if developed from North America where 2 languages result to be understood and spoken by roughly 100% of the population: English and Spanish. But when a US company feels like going to continental Europe, it usually is a pretty tough quest. The contrary is less of a true assertion: of course it’s hard for a European company to go to the US, but probably less complex, culturally speaking, than the reciprocal. In this respect, diversity constitutes a fierce and efficient entry barrier – as well as an exit barrier as it takes more time to invest in all cultural areas. The same logic applies to Africa: say a leading company emerges some day from Africa in the business of information technology, I would bet that this very company becomes a big, global success in a wink as investing new markets would turn out to be much simpler than having to cope with the initial diversity the company had to face.

Now is the time to cross fingers.

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. Dassault Systèmes soon to turn to B-to-C
2. The Euro vs. Dollar double gambetto for high tech corporations
3. Microsoft IDEAS software startups web 2.0-style
4. 10 reasons you should start a startup before turning 25
5. 11 reasons I'm joining Microsoft