On Safari with Oldupai George

I spent the first week of this trip in Accra starting the exploration into what we can do with Mifos in Africa. Initial takeaways and ideas on opportunities follow.

Ghana first glimpse
Key takeaways & learning

• Ghana has a very nascent software industry; there are a handful of local software companies but all struggle with
• • lack of talent
  • lack of opportunities to work with the large commercial buyers (who all spend their money outside Ghana)
• Implication is that there is significant need to develop software leadership – both business and technical – in Ghana
• There are several players working on this problem already – may be able to leverage/convene/augment some or all of them if we work in Ghana. These include Meltwater, Google, the WWW Foundation, some private sector companies, and the Kofi Annan Centre for ICT Innovation.
• Market for Mifos in West Africa is mixed
• • Lots of small MFIs who need systems
  • Few good providers (the big vendors don’t seem very present here)
  • very limited ability to pay, and limited tech skills
• Talent is going to be a huge constraining factor (this appears to be the case in Nairobi to an extent as well)
• • Senior software talent is virtually unheard of
  • development methodologies, how to ship, etc., are also very hard to find skills in
  • Competition for more junior talent is strong
  • May need to import some expat talent (people I talked with think need to import talent for 2-5 years)
• It appears relatively easy to do business in Ghana, including setting up organizations and bringing in capital and talent

Opportunities

• There’s a clear need for a massive uptick in software entrepreneurial and development talent in Ghana
• There’s also a clear need for a strong technology platform for microfinance in West Africa
• Additional business opportunities today are limited (as opposed to East Africa); however, as the market develops it’s likely that other opportunities will begin to appear; everyone wants to play in mobile now but the telcos are v hard to work with
• With a university, brainstormed about creating an “Applications” course where
• • Mifos exists as a full-fledged social business/project (basically: it’s working with customers)
  • Bring a mix of students into the org for a semester (include business, MIS, and CS) to learn specific things as part of a course
  • This would be less intensive than an internship
  • But more of a studio course – not just using Mifos as a textbook but pairing up with professionals to learn directly and apply to coursework

What’s really clear to me already is that there is absolutely an opportunity to create a running, real-world software business that works at the enterprise level (eg Mifos) and use that as a means of incubating talent. The opportunities elsewhere in Africa are likely to be very different – more commercially oriented – and the challenge/constraints in Ghana are going to be a) talent and b) potential impact (due to the nascent market).

Assumptions & Hypotheses

• Hypothesis: Faculty at universities can fulfill the architect needs of Mifos; this is proving to be false, and instead will need to bring in external talent. The faculty will be able to engage and help but not drive full-time, and they don’t appear to have serious enterprise architecture talent in place.
• Assumption: I have a few working assumptions about Mifos itself
• • Need to have a real, working organization that is actively engaged with MFI customers; this is the only way to keep the code alive and evolving and to keep the project from becoming purely academic
  • Need to have a separate organization from whoever we partner with (such as Ashesi); can have multiple tight affiliations, and could even structure as “The West African Center for Open Source and Software Entrepreneurship” or something and have Mifos be a core business within that
  • However, Mifos is too big and complex to try to embed into another organization. The best ways to develop skills will be
  • • Build directly by hiring and mentoring/growing junior talent
    • Build via partnerships by bringing students/trainees/etc into the organization for periods of time and exposing to (for example) QA, scalability, marketing, customer support, integration with mobile, etc.

During the next few months, I will be exploring options for creating a new, independent Mifos organization based in sub-Saharan Africa. The goal of this organization will be to create long-term positive impact in Africa using the Mifos platform to do the following:

• Continue to empower microfinance institutions to reach more of the poor with great financial services
• Contribute to the creation and evolution of a vibrant software industry in Africa

The organization might take any of a number of forms, ranging from an incubator that uses Mifos as the basis to build software engineering and entrepreneurial talent to a business that provides Mifos cloud services and builds and delivers other applications that leverage the platform. I’ll be exploring both academic and private sector partnerships to find existing organizations who can both contribute to and benefit from the Mifos platform and the Mifos community.

At the end of this three month exploratory phase, I hope to have multiple options identified which leverage different strengths and opportunities in different geographies. For example, one option might be a software entrepreneurism institute based in Ghana, connected to a leading university, which acts both as a teaching and mentoring facility for emerging software talent and as an incubator for new software business ideas. Another option might be a for-profit company based in Kenya that leads the Mifos open source community while pursuing new business opportunities in the mobile space, using Mifos as a back-end transaction platform to connect the data flowing among all the exciting new mobile applications starting to appear in East Africa.

The global Mifos open source community – software developers, IT companies, microfinance institutions, and others – are critical to the ongoing success and viability of the Mifos platform. I believe that the community can thrive, perhaps in a different form than it has worked in the past, but that the community will need new leaders to emerge to provide the direction and support needed to ensure that Mifos continues to evolve and provide great support to its users.

I’m in Accra this week, speaking with leaders at places like Ashesi University, DreamOval, RanCard Solutions, the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE), local microfinance organizations, and others. Starting next week, I’ll be based in Nairobi for the rest of June exploring opportunities and ideas in East Africa. In this early stage of the exploration, my goal is to collect as much information and generate as many ideas as possible, seeding the analysis and refinement needed to come to some viable alternatives.

Here on my blog I’ll keep a running commentary going on the meetings, discussions, and ideas that this exploration generate. I’m planning to do as much of this as possible in the open, enabling anyone and everyone to see and contribute to the process. I’ll also be dipping my toe into the Twitter world as @GeorgeConard.

If you’re a member of the Mifos community, an African MFI or software entrepreneur, or just have ideas about how Mifos might have the greatest long-term impact… I’d love to hear from you. You can comment here, post to the Mifos mailing lists, email me directly, find me on Twitter, etc…

I’m excited about this – it’s great to be back in Africa for an extended period of time, and I think that the Mifos software and Mifos community can create empowerment and opportunity for both software entrepreneurs and for the poor across Africa.