By Chrissy Martin, Guest Columnist

Silicon Savannah. Maybe you’ve heard this term (maybe you’ve even read why it’s a misnomer.)  It has been coined to describe Nairobi, Kenya, the unofficial capital of the rapid rise of technology innovation in Africa.

Kenya is home to M-Pesa, the mobile money transfer service that is used by over 60% of the Kenyan population.  It is also home to the iHub, an innovation and start-up incubator which appears to be increasingly like Silicon Valley in its ability to spin off successful, profitable technology companies.

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Tags: africa, economic development, Kenya, MEDA, start ups, technology entrepreneurs, Zambia

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

In most developed economies, people can be forgiven for taking banks for granted. After all, an ATM machine is rarely more than a couple blocks away with easy access to funds. People can easily connect with their banks online to pay bills without ever handling cash, and loans and lines of credit are readily available.

In much of the developing world, however, this infrastructure simply doesn’t exist. Thabiso Mochiko recently laid out the latest statistics on the issue at Business Day:

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Tags: africa, economic development, M-Pesa, mobile banking, mobile commerce, VNI-SA, Vodacom

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

State-of-the-art broadband services still don’t reach many parts of the African continent, especially rural villages. But one consumer technology is pervasive: cell phones.

According to the Cisco VNI Service Adoption Forecast, there will be 1.3 billion consumer mobile devices across the Middle East and Africa by 2016 – a billion of them being basic feature phones, not smartphones. At the same time, mobile video is expected to be the fastest-growing service in the region, with 184 million users projected by 2016.

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Tags: africa, healthcare, ICT4D, mobile video, rural, vni, VNI-SA

By Laura Walker Hudson, Guest Columnist

FrontlineSMS grew out of a conviction that mobile could be a more powerful tool if it was made completely accessible to smaller teams and projects as a professional tool. Also known as text messaging, SMS is the most widespread digital communications platform to date and is still growing. The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Service Adoption Forecast predicts that 90% of global mobile subscribers will be using SMS by 2016, up from 74% in 2011.

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Tags: africa, FrontlineSMS, Kenya, mobile technology, mobile vni forecast, NGO, sms, text messaging, vni, VNI-SA

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

As I scan the news feeds for new technology trends, I keep finding myself coming back to developing economies in Africa and Asia. As mobile network operators expand wireless services in these regions and mobile phone ownership grows, people continue to find new and amazing ways to use mobile networks to solve unique problems. Take healthcare.

In many rural and remote areas in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, patients suffer from a multitude of healthcare challenges: lack of skilled physicians, lack of access to healthcare technologies, and lack of personalized healthcare information. But if there were ever a set of problems that mobile technology could address, this is it.

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Tags: africa, Asia, Emerging Markets, mHealth, mobile applications, wireless