Toby Shapshak: You don't need an app for that

140,969 views ・ 2014-03-13

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
Let me start by asking you a question, just with a show of hands:
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Who has an iPhone?
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Who has an Android phone?
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Who has a Blackberry?
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Who will admit in public to having a Blackberry?
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(Laughter)
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And let me guess, how many of you,
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when you arrived here, like me, went and bought
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a pay-as-you-go SIM card? Yeah?
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I'll bet you didn't even know
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you're using African technology.
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Pay-as-you-go was a technology, or an idea,
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pioneered in Africa by a company called Vodacom
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a good 15 years ago,
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and now, like franchising,
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pay-as-you-go is one of the most dominant forces
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of economic activity in the world.
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So I'm going to talk about innovation in Africa,
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which I think is the purest form,
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innovation out of necessity.
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But first, I'm going to ask you some other questions.
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You don't have to put your hands up.
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These are rhetorical.
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Why did Nikola Tesla have to invent
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the alternating current that powers the lights
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in this building or the city that we're in?
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Why did Henry Ford have to invent the production line
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to produce these Fords that came in anything
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as long as they were black?
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And why did Eric Merrifield have to invent the dolos?
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Blank stares. That is what a dolos looks like,
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and in the background, you can see Robben Island.
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This is a small dolos, and Eric Merrifield
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is the most famous inventor you've never heard of.
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In 1963, a storm ripped up the harbor
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in a small South African town called East London,
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and while he was watching his kids playing
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with toys made from oxen bones called dolosse,
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he had the idea for this.
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It's a bit like a huge jumping jack,
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and they have used this in every harbor in the world
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as a breakwater.
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The global shipping economy would not be possible
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without African technology like this.
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So whenever you talk about Africa,
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you have to put up this picture of the world from space,
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and people go, "Look, it's the Dark Continent."
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Actually, it isn't.
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What it is is a map of innovation.
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And it's really easy to see where innovation's going on.
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All the places with lots of electricity, it isn't.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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And the reason it isn't is because everybody's
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watching television or playing Angry Birds.
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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So where it's happening is in Africa.
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Now, this is real innovation,
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not the way people have expropriated the word
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to talk about launching new products.
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This is real innovation, and I define it as problem-solving.
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People are solving real problems in Africa.
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Why? Because we have to.
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Because we have real problems.
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And when we solve real problems for people,
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we solve them for the rest of the world
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at the same time.
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So in California, everybody's really excited
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about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone
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and you can swipe your credit card,
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and people say, "We've liberated the credit card
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from the point of sale terminal."
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Fantastic. Why do you even need a credit card?
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In Africa, we've been doing that for years,
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and we've been doing it on phones like this.
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This is a picture I took at a place called Kitengela,
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about an hour south of Nairobi,
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and the thing that's so remarkable about the payment system
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that's been pioneered in Africa called M-Pesa
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is that it works on phones like this.
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It works on every single phone possible,
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because it uses SMS.
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You can pay bills with it, you can buy your groceries,
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you can pay your kids' school fees,
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and I'm told you can even bribe customs officials.
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(Laughter)
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Something like 25 million dollars a day
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is transacted through M-Pesa.
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Forty percent of Kenya's GDP
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moves through M-Pesa using phones like this.
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And you think this is just a feature phone.
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Actually it's the smartphone of Africa.
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It's also a radio, and it's also a torch,
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and more than anything else,
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it has really superb battery life.
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Why? Because that's what we need.
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We have really severe energy problems in Africa.
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By the way, you can update Facebook
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and send Gmail from a phone like this.
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So we have found a way to use
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the available technology to send money via M-Pesa,
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which is a bit like a check system
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for the mobile age.
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I come from Johannesburg, which is a mining town.
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It's built on gold.
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This is a picture I Instagrammed earlier.
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And the difference today is that the gold of today is mobile.
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If you think about the railroad system in North America and how that worked,
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first came the infrastructure,
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then came the industry around it, the brothels --
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it's a bit like the Internet today, right? —
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and everything else that worked with it:
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bars, saloons, etc.
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The gold of today is mobile,
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and mobile is the enabler that makes all of this possible.
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So what are some of the things that you can do with it?
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Well, this is by a guy called Bright Simons from Ghana,
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and what you do is you take medication,
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something that some people might spend their entire month's salary on,
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and you scratch off the code,
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and you send that to an SMS number,
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and it tells you if that is legitimate
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or if it's expired.
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Really simple, really effective, really life-saving.
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In Kenya, there's a service called iCow,
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which just sends you really important information
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about how to look after your dairy.
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The dairy business in Kenya
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is a $463 million business,
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and the difference between a subsistence farmer
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and an abundance farmer
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is only a couple of liters of milk a day.
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And if you can do that, you can rise out of poverty.
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Really simple, using a basic phone.
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If you don't have electricity, no problem!
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We'll just make it out of old bicycle parts
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using a windmill, as William Kamkwamba did.
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There's another great African that you've heard
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that's busy disrupting the automobile industry in the world.
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He's also finding a way to reinvent solar power
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and the electricity industry in North America,
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and if he's lucky, he'll get us to Mars,
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hopefully in my lifetime.
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He comes from Pretoria, the capital of [South Africa],
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about 50 kilometers from where I live.
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So back to Joburg, which is sometimes called Egoli,
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which means City of Gold.
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And not only is mobile the gold of today,
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I don't believe that the gold is under the ground.
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I believe we are the gold.
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Like you've heard the other economists say,
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we are at the point where China was
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when its boom years began,
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and that's where we're going.
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So, you hear the West talk about innovation at the edge.
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Well, of course it's happening at the edge,
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because in the middle, everybody's updating Facebook,
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or worse still, they're trying to understand
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Facebook's privacy settings.
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(Laughter)
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This is not that catchy catchphrase.
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This is innovation over the edge.
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So, people like to call Africa a mobile-first continent,
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but actually it's mobile-only,
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so while everybody else is doing all of those things,
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we're solving the world's problems.
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So there's only one thing left to say.
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["You're welcome"] (Laughter)
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(Applause)
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