So says, Duncan Arthur, in this open letter published on HumanIPO.
You might further have noticed that the most forward thinking of your competitors no longer trumpet Safaricom and M-Pesa as the main topic of discussion. Africans have cottoned onto this.
Well, when event organisers, not domain experts, are allowed to set the agenda for strategic convos in an ecosystem, due largely to a failure of local tech media to assume their accessory function as bellwether for the industry, what you get five years in a row are shallow powerpointfests declaring, to crescendoed drumrolls, that “Africa is mobile”. That and other recycled African tech platitudes that you will be charged hundreds of dollars to listen to.
And yes, HumanIPO could have written a better headline. No, don’t look at me.
Open Letter: You do Africa a disservice by underestimating how far we’ve comeDuncan Arthur, an independent payments, mobile and African banking expert, has written an open letter calling on primarily non-African conference organisers to drop their obsession with M-Pesa and begin to look at the bigger picture on the continent.
