MeliaCRED: Conversations with Elvis

Rwanda's progress over the past three decades has turned this small country into one of Africa's emerging technology hubs. Global Business Services (GBS) companies have recently set up delivery locations in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, and Joseph Semafara is a leading figure in providing these investors with a "soft landing." His company, SOLVEIT AFRICA, trains young graduates to become GBS agents. Together with other training providers in the Kigali ecosystem, Joseph works closely with the firms that are already in Rwanda, and with firms that are currently on the cusp of making Kigali their next delivery location. 

In our conversation, Joseph and I discuss how Kigali‘s ecosystem of digital services exports has changed over the past 2-3 years, and what this seems to have unleashed for Rwanda.

Africa is full of young people who see the internet as their ticket to a better life. Adewale Yusuf, a Nigerian tech entrepreneur, saw this continent-wide drive as an opportunity to connect African workers, mainly programmers, with global clients, mainly tech companies – all remotely. For this, he built TalentQL, a platform that acts as a wormhole – transporting African coders into the borderless realm of the global digital market.  But he realized that more was missing than the mere connection between the supply and demand of digital work. Few applicants were ready to deliver the services that global clients needed. So, Adewale did what entrepreneurs do, he founded another company: AltSchool.  AltSchool is a learning platform for software engineers, product marketers, and data scientists – remotely. In our conversation, Adewale and I discuss whether the pre-Covid world of cities and offices is turning into a post-Covid world of video calls and long-distance learning circles, and what roles young Africans might play in such a world.

The University of Oxford is home to the Oxford Internet Institute. Behind the blue door of a townhouse, too many researchers from around the world scramble for desks as they try to makes sense of life in the digital era. In his room on the third floor, Vili Lehdonvirta saw something in the data that gave him an idea he couldn’t shake. So, he did what academics do, he wrote a book about it.

Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research, and we spoke about his book, Cloud Empires, which, as of 27 September 2022, can be picked from shelves of bookstores and clicked from the warehouses of empires.

Vili traces the cyberlibertarian endeavours of using technology to free us from the shackles of coercive states. He shows how moving fast, breaking things, and with constant in-flight fixes, platforms like eBay, Silk Road, Upwork, Uber, Amazon, Apple App Store and others ended up becoming the very thing they set out to escape: states; often coercive ones at that. 

He shows how these platforms now have more in common with 13th and 14th century empires than with the libertarian utopias their founders sought to create. They are states based not on territorial jurisdiction but on membership.

We discuss if earthly governments can still reign in these empires, or whether they might become virtual democracies one day.