Dear Mr. Obama: What Africa Needs is a New Kind of Digital Marshall Plan

Forget charity. Forget cash. What Africa needs is a way to unleash its own entrepreneurship.

Its already doing that thanks to cell phones. There are now over 50 million on them on the continent.

So here's how to do it. Convert these to smartphones, create a secure online currency a la Paypal and let individual Africans participate on the world market.

It is really that simple. Once businesses and non-profits can go directly to individuals and vice versa then thieving government officials and billion-dollar banknotes like Zimbabwe become irrelevant.

Why send a bag of rice when you can give a village a way to earn rice credits that they can cash in at a store?

Why send a mosquito net when you can finance a local mosquito net factory.

You get the idea - we can leapfrog the old barriers of post-colonial Africa just by tapping into the wireless economy. Instead of giving people things we enable them to jumpstart their own economies. Cell phones offer a way to bypass the traditional gatekeepers who are generally forced to become corrupt by the system itself.

In fact, cell phones themselves are an example of this new approach. Look at it this way - in 15 years Africa grew from a legacy of just 5 million phone lines - almost all government controlled - to 50 million cell phones - mostly privately controlled.

Old thinking is to give conscience money to the poor while buying up resources cheaply. This isn't grand collusion although it might as well be - Bono raises money and give it away to poor villages while the corporations funding him look for ways to sell baby formula or extract minerals for less. Unfortunately, the Chinese are beat us at this game because they skipped the conscience money part and increased the direct payments to the governments and top officials to get the resources even more cheaply. Example 1 - Darfur (in case you wondered who paid for the oil pipeline that financed the janjaweed).

Plus the Chinese don't place moral conditions on anyone. Example 2 - sending weapons to Mugabe in Zimbabwe so that he increase military pressure when his rigged elections were being contested.

Smartphones and the wireless economy tied to small manufacturing infrastructure is the new success model for Africa. It requires two things: underwriting the distribution of phones and the guarantee of a new "Marshall" Protection Plan. Hands off the little guys - if you steal from the world wireless economy we can find you and we'll get you, so don't do it.

Once people are engaged they buy or borrow what they need to grow their own food, information on how to do it and access to markets that will buy it. They will know what to make or grow and who to trade with.

This will extend to medicine and medical knowledge.

It will tend to redistribute wealth and power among the harder working and women.

This concept will require on-the-ground guarantors and vigilance against a new kind techie kleptocrat, but it is still much, much better than anything we have done in the the past. And it is inevitable.

White Shaka Wins International Storytelling Award

International Fuze Slideshare Storytelling Contest Winner

White Shaka Boy - the multimedia graphic novel about a New Yorker who discovers his personal Obama-like connection to Africa, won an Award in the Fuze Slideshare online storytelling contest.

White Shaka was judged the best Multimedia Story in the International Fuze Slideshare Storytelling contest that attracted contestants from all corners of the universe, where it was described by one voter as an "AWESOME...use of slides to tell a story."

Judges included Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos; Om Malik, Journalist; Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, Pete Cashmore, Founder, Mashable and Ann Handley, CCO of MarketProfs.

White Shaka - Graphic Novel

View more documents from Alan Brody.

Slideshare is the leading Powerpoint presentation sharing site. Fuze Meeting is a collaborative videoconferencing site.

White Shaka Boy is a parable about the new land grab taking place in Africa today. It is based on a true story about a teen who discovers he is the biracial heir to the only white Zulu Chief of Africa. To win back his empire he has to learn about Zulu culture and the new realities of urbanized Africa. He also discovers early feminism in Zulu war culture and the underlying connection between Shaka fighting method and Gandhi's Satyagraha (passive resistance).

White Shaka features an award-winning, sophisticated Zulu hip-hop soundtrack from the album by Imbube, produced by Draztik. The graphics were produced by Revo Yanson.

The book and story concept was created by Alan Brody, a well-known new media pioneer, journalist, speaker and entrepreneur who stumbled upon this saga while researching an article about his early years, growing up in Africa. "I wanted to show my clients that to succeed in sales you have to be willing to make direct contact with your prospects - a grinding, rejection-laden process. I thought I could use the techniques of Zulu warfare to show how to thrive. Then, I stumbled upon this story and somehow, my inner comic creator, music-lover and African adventurer came together."

White Shaka can be ordered on Amazon with the complete 17-song soundtrack CD for $19.95 or directly from the White Shaka website

All 35 Webisodes will be loaded on Slideshare over the next 6 months.

Slideshare is a popular presentation-sharing site in the business world that has crossed over to the creative world.

White Shaka Featured Story on Major Website

White Shaka was selected as the featured story on the major slide site Slideshare.

Please visit and vote on Slideshare.

Vote for White Shaka Boy on Slideshare

White Shaka has officially entered the Fuze Tell a Story contest on Slideshare.

Please vote here.

White Shaka - Graphic Novel

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

White Shaka - Graphic Novel

View more OpenOffice presentations from Alan Brody.

The Trouble with Books - Get Visual: Some Book Expo Thoughts

We love books - but seriously, who has time for them? Plus don't we need them to be visual. The multimedia brain cries out for them.

You wouldn't be reading this if you weren't into graphic novels - but they are books too....

So what do you do?

Two Solutions:

1. Graphic novels online.
2. Visual summaries of print books

We're doing both!

White Shaka is now being serialized online.

Our publisher ViziPress.com is producing visual summaries of some great books:

What Would Google Do?
Cigarette Seduction.

Publish Post

You got 3 minutes - we'll tell you what these books are really about!

Mr. Obama Goes to Africa – What Will We Find?

.....a whole new way of looking at Africa [Update of my May blog]

The US public is about to get a wake up call when Mr. Obama shows up in West Africa in July. They figure this is probably no more that a diversion from our economic troubles at home – so now they ‘re going to see huts, misery and warfare. Should make us feel better right?

Actually what they are going to see are thriving, if challenged urban metropolises, sophisticated, if accented business thinkers and then something else……

China. And the question on the lips of many enthused Africans: “What took you so long?”

While we were looking the other way China has moved in the African vacuum left behind after the Cold War collapsed. They will find that most new mining development, banking and oil has been bankrolled by China. Many of these contracts give China both preferred pricing on new commodities but actually restrict sales to competitors – like us.

We will wake up to find who is really underwriting the conflict in Darfur and then we will be startled to find what has happened in Africas, largest and once most war-torn country: The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Chinese are planning to build a dam so big that it will light up Europe. Imagine a Europe that buys its power from a $60bn dam in the jungle!

We are also going to find that Africa has developed a new personal trading platform that totally change the way governments function on the continent – cell phones. Outside of commodities, cell communications is bar far, the fastest growing business in Africa. Cell towers have leap-frogged wired infrastructure with the result that Africans can talk to each other – they even trade cell minutes as a form of currency.

Once you add secure accounts and smart phones, you know have a way to plug individual Africans into the World Market. At first that may not seem like a big deal but let’s imagine that western charities stop giving money to organizations that have a habit of grabbing huge chunks off the top – instead they open personal accounts by chief, village, family and person and hand out resources at the personal level. The value is held outside the country so the government or local thug can’t steal it – suddenly, you have a new Africa. You have mosquitoes in your village – buy some nets on our eBay Africa store we’ll ship ‘em to you. Need some water purification straws with that? No problem – and by the way, if you can get our cassava to market by Monday you’ll get twice the normal rate.

China won’t be offering these services anytime soon – but we will – it is part of the DNA of the Internet culture. And Africa is expecting it, they want it….from us. China, after all, is not exactly a friendly presence: after they have paid off the local powers, they tend to move in as a hermetic army seizing the key jobs and thought they will learn the lingo they are generally perceived as aliens. They can also be brutal. We, on the other hand, are perceived as returning brothers and sisters. The racial guilt trip built into the US conversation, has not only been put aside thanks to Mr. Obama’s presidency, but it was never a big part of the personal conversation in Africa, anyway. The only conversation that matters is opportunity and personal growth – they are ready to get a piece of the American Dream, African style.

In aggregate you have these two converging possibilities – a continent with a wealth of energy (oil and natural gas being discovered almost daily up and down the West coast), natural commodities whose value is increasing and the possibility of getting wealth into the hands of individuals as opposed to the former kleptocracies.

Needless to say, the carping about “let’s focus on America” will continue. How silly, the one continent that needs to buy just about everything we stand for – from proudcts to technology to ideology, and could actually pay for it, thanks to their natural wealth, has the power to transform our economy – just as Europe did in the 50’s. If we just get over our history and our self-absorption our next great wealth machine lies over the Atlantic – a short hop from our new trading partner.