Moore's Law Comes to Africa

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In the new book King Peggy (available on Amazon), about a secretary called back to run her hometown in Ghana, the one place that must be guarded 24 hours a day is the cell phone tower.

This technology is allowing Africa to leapfrog the 20th century and go directly to the 21st.

Some of the most amazing stories I covered at ZDNet in the last decade concerned Africans and mobile phones.

Two come to mind right away.

• African women would buy mobile phones and calling plans, then go into the bush and sell calls to other women in remote villages. This gave the villages access to city markets.
• African doctors were performing ultrasounds on patients using mobile phones and scanners, sending the files to city hospitals for processing and having the results read back by text.

As my former colleague Joe McKendrick at Smartplanet reported last week, smartphones are taking this to a whole new level.

He quotes a study from the World Bank showing that 5 billion phones are now in the developing world, that three in four people there have access to one, resulting in new industries that barely exist here.

Consider that African woman again. In 2006, she probably carried a Nokia (NOK) Symbian or other feature phone. Today she can afford to buy a smartphone based on Android. In 2006, she had to return to her home village to recharge the phone. Today she can buy a solar charger, like those on the Web site, ThePocketSolution, and stay in the field.

Cell phone towers are also going wireless, as Inhabitat notes. Wireless towers and wireless phones mean broadband can go everywhere.

This enables new forms of mobile payments. It lets government deliver services cheaply. It connects remote villages to the global food market -- pretty important when the U.S. Midwest is in drought. It creates new jobs and new industries for people across the continent.

As the BBC reports, a whole new generation of African-born entrepreneurs are poised to take advantage of this. There are now more than a dozen "innovation hubs" scattered about the continent, tracked by the site AfricaHubs, all filled with talented people trying to make the most of the technology available.

Google (GOOG) is recognizing the opportunity, and rolling out its Gmail service in Africa through text messaging cited by the Web site, 9to5Google.

China isn't loaning Africa $20 billion out of the goodness of its heart (as reported in Bloomberg BusinessWeek); it's loaning out that money because it expects a big return.

Our 20th century economy was based on very expensive infrastructure -- roads, electrical grids, phone networks. Smartphones let Africa build the network without the grid, creating a whole new entrepreneurial class and a huge opportunity for global growth.

At the time of publication, the author had no investments in Africa.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.