Wander the streets of any big African city and it soon becomes clear that a lack of enterprise is hardly the problem. In Nairobi’s biggest slum, Kibera, the narrow dirt streets bustle with businesses charging phones from generators; running tiny cinemas showing Premier League football on satellite TVs; and selling solar panels. What you won’t find are clean toilets, potable water or anyone earning much over a few dollars a day. The main leapfrogging that takes place is over the open sewers. That is not something you can fix with a mobile-phone app.
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African tech types often think they can quickly copy rich-country products and sell them to the urban middle class. But then they discover that there is no getting around complex tax laws, a dearth of engineers and fragmented markets. The Western investors who back them have even less grasp of just how dysfunctional basic infrastructure can be, notes Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan investor and a political activist. All the evidence suggests that technology firms are no better at leapfrogging such hurdles than, say, a carmaker. The only part of the continent with a mature tech scene is South Africa: a country which also has good roads, reliable power and plenty of well-educated graduates.