I think the article is plein of cliché about the africa: electricity, internet price ?!! seriously these things have been improved in most of african countries especially in the north of Africa (Ghana has the fastest internet speed in africa ), and now its much more an advantage than of disadvantage for tech companies.especially for salaries and low fees.
The question that I looked for an answer for in the article is : where is the silicon valleys of Africa?, I know that there have been many attempts to create tech hubs , like the "cyber parks" in Algeria and Tunisia, where you can rent offices with a symbolic price and create your startup where the process is covered by professionals of different fields (juridique,financial, banks ...) , but these cyber parks remains pretty much empty , or just occupied by big international companies selling their stuffs or promoting dead technologies to young students (like Microsoft)
Person of a Nigerian family here; with a Nigerian-born wife and who's been to Lagos more than 5 times.
Unless some amazing changes in infrastructure have happened in Lagos since the last time I was there in 2008, reliable electricity & internet is still a luxury a lot of people cannot afford.
I think one of the best examples I know of is Cape Town, but it is definitely a microcosm compared to the rest of Africa. There is an initiative to create a silicon valley environment with angel investors as well, http://www.siliconcape.com. There are opportunities for government investing options as well, which provide funding in exchange for creating a company that can provide stable jobs to locals for years to come.
I think the the situation in South Africa will also improve as we start developing the square kilometre radio telescope array to the north of Cape Town - which will require large amounts of server and computing power for data processing. This will attract more international interest, and Cape Town is also the home of an Amazon dev. centre.
It is true that Ghana has good internet access, the same is true for Zimbabwe (even though it has such a bad reputation, fibre optic internet is available). I think in the future we will see more data centres being built in Africa for worldwide redundancy. I think this will happen in Ghana and Nigeria as they have oil reserves to power the data centres as well as low risk for earth quakes.
I think there are lots of opportunities for tech hubs to arise in Africa, even though there are still lots of problems, it may even happen in an unlikely place, for instance Mauritius is trying to be forward thinking and is going to start providing tablets to every child on the island. Zambia are pushing for improved tech infrastructure - widespread rural telecommunications, which may lead to the development of large mesh networks. I think we have many opportunities to solve these problems we face in Africa with technology, with many opportunities for growth, and Africans are particularly hungry for change.
I wonder if creating the environment is enough. The thing that valley has and you can't find around is investors: From seed money to angels. Every region has 2 or 3 but that's about it. The culture is different and you can't change that overnight. Not to mention that Europeans are way more skeptical/prudent when it comes investments anyway compared to USA.
I volunteered at a Startup Weekend in Johannesburg last year and do agree with this statement. With that being said I do think that the investors or starting to get more tech savvy.
My family on my fiancee's side is from South Africa and I regularly travel back and forth between South Africa and the US. Whenever I'm there I try to line the trips up with tech conferences and/or local meetup groups. South Africa has a strong tech community that is doing really interesting things.
The thing that surprised me was that on my last trip I found out that one of my fiancee's family members is a investor in a startup. This guy is not very tech savvy, but even he could see the possibilities. Does the community still have a ways to go, yes. But with that being said I do think they will get there.
Also, the stuff happening in Cape Town is really exciting.
South Africa has serious structural issues preventing a tech revolution: a rotten school system, a welfare-based economy with a tiny tax base, that is dependent on credit-driven consumer demand rather than production, underinvestment in infrastructure, and government with a huge mandate, that is too timid/rent-seeking to change things (heaven help us if our Proportional Representation system fragments into something like those of Israel or Italy), big business that has a long tradition of collusion and price-fixing, a white minority that is hell-bent on maintaining the status quo, and a union movement that cripples job creation. Previously, South Africa was a resource-driven economy - there are limited traditions of entrepreneurship.
The chances are good that the African startup revolution, if it comes, won't start in South Africa.
The question that I looked for an answer for in the article is : where is the silicon valleys of Africa?, I know that there have been many attempts to create tech hubs , like the "cyber parks" in Algeria and Tunisia, where you can rent offices with a symbolic price and create your startup where the process is covered by professionals of different fields (juridique,financial, banks ...) , but these cyber parks remains pretty much empty , or just occupied by big international companies selling their stuffs or promoting dead technologies to young students (like Microsoft)