[roughly]

It strikes me how many of the challenges mentioned in the post are straight up just old school infrastructure problems - like irrigation, and roads. There've been attempts in various parts of Africa to use tech to circumvent a lack of proper infrastructure (the entire cell-phone-payments system that I'm sure everyone's heard of, and wide spread use of cell phones generally without landlines), but I'm always curious if this is Better or if it's just Cheaper. There's also a reasonably credible perception of the valley and VC broadly as being too focused on shiny tech and not enough on actual institutions and capacity-building, and I'm curious if that's echoed in the African startup/tech scene as well, or if maybe a healthier or more holistic approach is more common in that community.

[jeffreyrogers]

The important aspects of agriculture were mechanized/automated decades ago. There's a lot of room for growth in Africa[1] just by taking tech that's old but works and using it there. If it has to be marketed as SV style entrepreneurship that's fine, but I doubt any of the tech layered on top will be a real driver of productivity.

[1]: The caveat is that heavy mechanization is capital intensive and since labor costs are lower in Africa the optimal mix of mechanization will be different than in the US. It also leads to centralization and larger farms which is sometimes undesirable for political/cultural reasons.

[traceroute66]

> I'm always curious if this is Better or if it's just Cheaper

In terms of cell phones, neither.

I know people who tried to push on with various cross-border activities virtually during COVID, some of which involved quite a lot of people spread out across Africa.

TL;DR it didn't work out that well.

African colleagues kept on dropping out of remote sessions because of various issues with local infrastructure (e.g. unpredictable local power supply killing cell masts).

But also there was a lot of feedback that Western style cell contracts with generous data allowances are either non-existent or atrociously expensive. So a lot of people just plain couldn't be online for long sessions and had to drop-in here and there.

[whimsicalism]

> not enough on actual institutions and capacity-building

We have the east coast to think about all that silly stuff