Juliana Rotich: Meet BRCK, Internet access built for Africa

73,422 views ・ 2013-06-18

TED


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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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Living in Africa is to be on the edge,
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metaphorically, and quite literally
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when you think about connectivity before 2008.
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Though many human intellectual and technological leaps
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had happened in Europe and the rest of the world,
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but Africa was sort of cut off.
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And that changed, first with ships
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when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution
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and also the Industrial Revolution.
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And now we've got the digital revolution.
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These revolutions have not been evenly distributed
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across continents and nations.
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Never have been.
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Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables
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that connect Africa to the rest of the world.
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What I find amazing is that Africa
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is transcending its geography problem.
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Africa is connecting to the rest of the world
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and within itself.
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The connectivity situation has improved greatly,
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but some barriers remain.
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It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be.
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In 2008, one of the problems that we faced
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was lack of information flow.
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There was a media blackout in 2008,
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when there was post-election violence in Kenya.
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It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time.
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So we came together and we created software
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called Ushahidi.
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And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili.
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I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators.
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This is David and Erik.
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I call them brothers from another mother.
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Clearly I have a German mother somewhere.
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And we worked together first with building
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and growing Ushahidi.
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And the idea of the software was to gather information
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from SMS, email and web, and put a map
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so that you could see what was happening where,
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and you could visualize that data.
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And after that initial prototype,
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we set out to make free and open-source software
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so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did.
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All the while, we also wanted to give back
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to the local tech community that helped us
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grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days.
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And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi,
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an actual physical space
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where we could collaborate,
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and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya.
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We did that with the support of different organizations
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like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network.
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And we were able to grow this software footprint,
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and a few years later it became
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very useful software,
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and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti
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where citizens could indicate where they are
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and what their needs were,
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and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis
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and the tsunami in Japan.
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Now, this year the Internet turns 20,
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and Ushahidi turned five.
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Ushahidi is not only the software that we made.
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It is the team, and it's also the community
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that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee.
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We did not imagine that there would be this many maps
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around the world.
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There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps,
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and even environmental monitoring crowd maps.
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We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya
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and that it has some use to people around the world
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trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with.
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There is more that we're doing to explore this idea
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of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen,
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if I share the information with whatever device that I have,
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could inform you about what is going on,
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and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture
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of what's going on.
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I moved back to Kenya in 2011.
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Erik moved in 2010.
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Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago
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where there was abundant Internet access.
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I had never had to deal with a blackout.
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And in Kenya, it's a very different reality,
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and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress
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and the digital revolution is the electricity problem.
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The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this
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can be, let's just say very annoying.
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Blackouts are not fun.
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Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden
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the power goes out,
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your Internet connection goes down with it,
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so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem,
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how do I switch back?
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And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again.
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Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now,
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and other parts of Africa.
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The other problem that we're facing
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is that communication costs are also still a challenge.
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It costs me five Kenyan shillings,
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or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China.
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Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria?
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Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost
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to connect within Africa.
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And also, when traveling within Africa,
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you've got different settings for different mobile providers.
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This is the reality that we deal with.
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So we've got a joke in Ushahidi
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where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."
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[Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.]
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What if we could overcome the problem
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of unreliable Internet and electricity
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and reduce the cost of connection?
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Could we leverage the cloud?
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We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi.
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Could we leverage these technologies
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to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country?
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So we looked at the modem,
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an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet,
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and asked ourselves why
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the modems that we are using right now
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are built for a different context, where you've got
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ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity,
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yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury.
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We wanted to redesign the modem
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for the developing world, for our context,
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and for our reality.
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What if we could have connectivity with less friction?
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This is the BRCK.
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It acts as a backup to the Internet
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so that, when the power goes out,
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it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network.
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Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive.
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It's actually everywhere.
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Most towns at least have a 3G connection.
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So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this.
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The other reason that we built this
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is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours
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of battery left, so you can continue working,
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you can continue being productive,
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and let's just say you are less stressed.
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And for rural areas, it can be
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the primary means of connection.
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The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play
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when we wondered how can we use the cloud
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to be more intelligent so that
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you can analyze the different networks,
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and whenever you switch on the backup,
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you pick on the fastest network,
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so we'll have multi-SIM capability
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so that you can put multiple SIMs,
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and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on,
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and if the up time on that is not very good,
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then you hop onto the next one.
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The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere.
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With load balancing, this can be possible.
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The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors --
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is this idea that you could have an on-ramp
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for the Internet of things.
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Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this.
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It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach
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a satellite module so that you could have
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Internet connectivity even in very remote areas.
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Out of adversity can come innovation,
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and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers
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in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure?
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And for us, we begin with solving the problem
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in our own backyard in Kenya.
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It is not without challenge.
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Our team has basically been mules carrying components
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from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations
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with customs border agents.
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"What are you carrying?"
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And the local financing is not
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part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects.
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So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that,
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through the support of many people,
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not only here but online,
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the BRCK has been Kickstarted,
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and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.
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I will close by saying that, if we solve this
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for the local market, it could be impactful
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not only for the coders in Nairobi
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but also for small business owners
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who need reliable connectivity,
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and it can reduce the cost of connecting,
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and hopefully collaboration within African countries.
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The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy
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are connectivity and entrepreneurship.
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The BRCK is our part
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to keep Africans connected,
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and to help them drive the global digital revolution.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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