Hello, Senegal:  Confining User Groups by Focusing on a Single Pilot Country

It is a crucial business strategy to focus on a single, tightly knit set of users when targeting the African continent with a new technology.  Why?  Because of the Continent’s vast complexities in light of its peoples, government regulations and prevailing technology standards.  Without controlling for these variables up front, regardless of how expert a firm may be in its approach to procuring users any other place in the world, its foray into Africa will not last long.

Delineating the Parameters of Confinement

When targeting sub-Saharan Africa, a focus group for a pilot launch of a platform can target users in a small city within a particular country.  The target population should,
however, exceed the size of a large village. The initial target group could also be more dispersed, such as the coast line of an entire country.  Port cities are great target regions.   Other elements that we considered when selecting a pilot country included:

1. Proximity to the CEO and Founder’s birthplace
2. Lack of competition in the mobile banking sector from new market players
3. Some amount of existing mobile phone adoption and user practices
4. A complex local banking system connected to global banks
5. Basic infrastructure of electricity and some broadband proliferation
6. Personal and professional networks of “boots on the ground” for building merchant networks
7. An English or French speaking Diaspora versus a variety of tribal languages
8. A relatively stable regime
9. The relevant Diaspora has a Facebook presence
10. A culture of remittance from the Diaspora to home country

Why Senegal ?

Our team chose to launch its mobile banking pilot in Senegal, a West African country on the very outermost border of the Continent bounded by the Atlantic Ocean.  We found that doing this made enormous sense as Willstream’s Founder  and CEO was born
in South Africa, but raised and received his primary school education in Senegal. He is also half Senegalese.

Few Americans know that Senegal has a rich tradition of great schools.  Consequently, they have a foundation for middle class growth and fairly rapid levels global technology
adoption, particularly in light of social networks and mobile phones.  Furthermore, our CEO’s deep roots in Senegal allowed us to “get on the ground” quickly and solicit the kind of assistance only an African-based, African-originated and indigenous platform can cultivate.  Our familiarity with the country gave us a distinct and unbeatable advantage over any other European or US firm that might have been attempting the same thing.

Essentially, Willstream launched in its own house.  Thus, in light of West Africa, Willstream is a formidable competitor in the cash free, mobile payments space and cannot be stopped, regardless of the competing platforms that exist.

The First Marketing and User Procurement Challenge in Senegal

Whenever a platform’s user procurement strategy decides to artificially confine its target market for the purposes of uncovering and analyzing data via a controlled pilot, its overall user numbers suffer.  Specifically, confining the pool of users that you target has an inverse relationship on user numbers.  This is problematic because new media
platforms, particularly mobile and social media platforms, are valued by
investors in light of how many users they have.  In fact, this user calculation, in raw numbers, can be more important than revenue or even profit.

A secondary challenge is that by leveraging mobile in the first place, a company has already made a decision to “go big” because the underlying technology is so powerful and widely adopted on a global scale.  However, by artificially constraining the
nature of how the underlying technology is deployed via a tightly-defined user group, a company is almost launching counter intuitively. It wants to “go big,” but it won’t and can’t.

Finally, Senegal is a country whose Diaspora is quite varied outside of Africa.  My micro-local research in New York City alone, found that Senegalese migrants in the US were less inclined to be formally educated and thus, much less likely to adopt complex mobile technology (such as banking) than would their counterparts who lived in Asia and Europe.  In fact, many Senegalese Americans were unable to read our Willstream homepage without a detailed explanation.  I found that almost all adult Senegalese migrants in New York speak one of several tribal languages including, Wolof and Pulaar, but some could only understand French or English to speak it.

What Did Senegal Tell Us ?

There are several elements that emerge as important, vis a vis Senegal, when targeting a cross-global technology platform, such as mobile banking or social media networks.  The first element is the general literacy of the Diaspora.  This means that there needs to be an understanding of both the literacy of the recipient/beneficiary communities within a country like Senegal, and there also must be a keen comprehension of how the Diaspora/sender community understands secondary languages, such as French or English.  Specifically, a firm must ask:  Can migrants read these languages or are they better at speaking and understanding them?  Figuring this out, of course, makes a huge
impact on how a  platform’s development team will word its web copy and program the site in general.

Senegal also opened a Pandora’s Box of cultural questions which I will continue to explore as I move forward.  Many of these cultural questions are based in issues of gender power and economic power – two factors that are quite a bit more opaque in a country like the US.  In Senegal, and throughout Africa, both elements are intertwined and of incredible importance moving forward with strategizing user procurement and marketing in Africa.  Senegal is a perfect place to test the waters with these two hot buttons.

Inorganic and Indirect Users in Emerging Markets and Crisis
Nations

   When crafting online and mobile platforms that target emerging  markets and nations in crisis, one must anticipate that the end user may be inorganic, a third-party or an indirect user.  In some instances, emerging market platforms can be fashioned from websites or technologies where the flow of information reaches the intended user through a strategic work around or a circumvention that deploys more traditional means of communication.  Specifically, the intended end user often is not actually a part of the platform’s user community.  This means that they are not at the other end of the platform logging in or posting etc… Instead, the information available on the platform arrives to them from another means, such as through radio broadcast or word of mouth or voice.

Thus, the intended end user in an emerging or in crisis nation may respond to the flow of information after the fact – after it has been churning around a bit out in the world. Therefore, the platform marketers’ mandate can be to deploy offline strategies and tweaked messaging to elicit the participation of this intended user as a third-party, drawing them into the flow of information through the Diaspora, through word of mouth.

The developers can anticipate how the Diaspora might play into the expansion of their platform from the very beginning. The third-party/inorganic end user, possibly not a member of the Diaspora but a member of the press or separate community altogether, receives the intended information because they have greater access to the infrastructure required for online or mobile technology. The platform is then communicated to the intended end user, the Diaspora, via rudimentary communication like radio broadcasts and voice.

Intra-Africa Diasporic End Users

According to international news reports last week, the Somali rebel group known as the Shabab opened a Twitter account.  Certainly, it is no secret that terrorist organizations are attracted to the openness and power of social media.  And, this makes sense for recruitment purposes and wide spread messaging strategies. Furthermore, the New York Times noted that the Shabab, while renowned throughout the Horn of Africa and parts of Kenya, likely has no real Twitter followers; nor will they ever have any real
Twitter followers in the orthodox sense intended by the social media mobile
paradigm.But, not for the reasons that you think.

The Shabab’s lack of Twitter followers is less of a moral or political issue and more an infrastructure-based one. Specifically, Somalia, a vast East African nation that borders Kenya and the Indian Ocean, has been in heated civil war for twenty years.  As
well, the country has seen nearly half a million of its people perish from an
apocalyptic famine over the past year. Needless to say, Somalia is a key example of why less developed nations lack the infrastructure (and human impetus), to build an online or mobile culture.  So one can only wonder how opening a Twitter account to follow a terrorist organization squares with this reality.

Well, it doesn’t.
Evidently the Shabab utilize Twitter quite shrewdly;  in line with how Democracy protest movements have deployed it.

The New York Times notes,

“(A)t the same time, they have shown their
technical skills, making powerful suicide bombs and roadside explosives. They also have a geeky side, showcasing their work through slick propaganda videos,
Web sites and digital chat rooms. .. Beyond that — and quite frightening to many American officials — is the fact that educated Westerners are clearly working for the Shabab. Several Somali-Americans have killed themselves as suicide bombers, and even non-Somali Westerners, including one man from Alabama, are serving as battlefield commanders.” (NY Times 12/14/2011)

The Somalis are part of what I call the intra-African Diaspora: peoples who have fled to a nearby African country, Kenya, to escape massive unrest in their own land. Since the nation is in a bloody civil war, it is clear that the actual Somali people are the intended recipients of Shabab’s message and that Intra-Diasporic Somalis, as well as those that remain in country, are the intended direct end users of the Shabab’s Twitter messaging.  And, while there are many Somalis who have migrated to other continents completely, the Shabab seeks to impact its own people with its message via Twitter. However, they achieve this by using Twitter as the medium to speak to this indirect end user in hopes of ultimately reaching their intended end user: the Somali people who are impacted daily by the civil war.

Who are the inorganic, indirect end users. The Shabab “tweets:”

1. the press, including radio and television broadcast

2. the political sympathizers outside of the Diaspora who are
not of Somali descent

3. their enemies and military groups who they oppose

From here, the Shabab can push its message to its intended Twitter end users, without this intended end user having to physically log into an account. The power of external, non-web and mobile means carries the flow of information to them after the initial strategy of indirect user harvesting has been deployed.

“In a prescient column, in the New York Tribune, Dorothy Thompson
foresaw that the broadcast revealed the way politicians could use the power of
mass communications to create theatrical illusions, to manipulate the
public. “All unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater of
the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of
all time,” she wrote. “They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied
by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable,
completely fantastic proposition as to create a nation-wide panic.”

–  War of the Worlds, Orson Welles,
And The Invasion from
Mars

Radio remains one of the most intimate forms of communication that marketers have at their fingertips.  It forces the listener to use their imaginations to conjure the message in 360 degrees. Just like Orson Welles managed to captivate the entire country with words and sound effects using only the radio, good marketers must deploy these tactics of pure suggestion when telling any given story through voice alone.

Driving an offline user group, or at least intermittent internet users, online, is one of the underlying challenges of building Willstream’s business model. Consequently, I argue in a previous post that the most dependable methodology of communicating with the African Diaspora globally is via the radio.  Radio advertisements, independent podcasts
and interviews serve as simple and direct ways to communicate the usefulness of
an online platform to a demographic that does not necessarily surf the web.

There are a variety of reasons that the sub-Saharan African Diaspora that Willstream initially targets is responsive to radio messaging above all else. Primarily, it is simply that radio is ubiquitous throughout the Emerging World, particularly in countries with upheaval and crisis.  When all else fails in light of communication, radio serves the public even better than print.  Thus, unstable or under developed infrastructure with regard to the fiber optic networks that facilitate web connectedness are no match for the dependability and accessibility of radio.

So, how do we communicate a complex online paradigm to radio-users?  How does Willstream use only words to encourage people with a limited understanding of the web, online?

And, can a more “primitive” mode of communication, like the radio, drive a people to become part of a cutting-edge user base?  Will they get it?  How do we create one audience from another?

At first blush, to a digital strategist, anyway, the most logical approach to harnessing online users is to leverage an SEO blueprint or ad-driven strategy.  Specifically, for
those of us steeped in the various means of driving users to a website or specific web-based content, online strategies seem to make the most sense.

But for Willstream, radio provides an inexpensive and experimental point of entry for discussion and introduction to what is quite a multifaceted social mobile media.

Essentially, radio works because it is:

• Ubiquitous in the Emerging World
• Dependable in crisis
• Inexpensive for the platform developers to enter the marketplace with a mass messaging campaign
• A descriptive means that encourages experimental, lenghty and in-depth communication styles

Ultimately, I am finding that before any online or digital strategy is pulled together,  there must be a way to dovetail the basic language of radio advertisement and interview style into the overall platform- to- user-communication plan.

Radio is a sound salvation
Radio is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don’t give you any choice ’cause they think that it’s treason
So you had better do as you are told
You better listen to the radio

–Elvis Costello (1978)

Even though this blog is about the unique power of mobile technology to deliver  healthcare and educational solutions to the emerging world, I must also emphasize that there is something inherently fragile about the mobile medium. Thus, while there is an evergreen optimism surrounding mobile technology’s ability to touch everyone throughout the world in a positive way, it is just optimism. It is not reality. The reality is that many planets need to line up, and stay lined up, for mobile solutions to truly
be useful in the emerging world.

Mobile technology not only assumes that there is a constant flow of electricity present to maintain the charge on a single cell battery, but also that there is a willing and able network carrier from which to derive a signal. It requires functional cell towers and service payment means. Without these crucial elements present, mobile technology is wholly useless in the emerging world. Ultimately, a lot must go right for mobile
technology to be a viable solution anywhere. In fact, in the absence of both electricity
and the complex subterranean fiber optic infrastructure needed to facilitate internet and terrestrial communication (i.e. landlines), the emerging world is actually better off using smoke signals when trying to communicate internationally. Literally. On a side note, without a stable regime that supports a reliable and uncorrupted postal service, the smoke signal trumps the mail service as well.

Therefore, when considering the emerging world, and specifically, parts of sub-Saharan Africa; one must accept that there are numerous obstacles to the successful deployment of mobile communication and mobile payment solutions. These obstacles range from the absence of basic utilities like electricity, to the failure of a robust mobile network to deploy within the region. Consequently, it makes sense to think about many areas of the African Continent in the same way one might regard a part of the world
during and after a major crisis.  This crisis could be a natural one, like a tsunami or earthquake.  Or it could be man made, like an internal terrorist attack or external war strike.

It is, however, with this crisis scenario in mind, that one can best construct the profile of the end user to an emerging world mobile payment platform.  The end user’s living conditions on the African Continent could be quite spartan in light of even our most vivid
imagination. As well, the end user/sender on this side of the “developed world” could be destabilized or struggling in many ways as well.

In the case of our platform, Willstream, there is even a third party/end user — an organizational beneficiary.  This beneficiary could be as large as a humanitarian institution or as small as a roadside bark collector in a small village. They too can struggle with less than favorable market forces, bad government actors and poverty-related destabilization.

So what is the best way to reach end users with the message about a new mobile service for sub-Saharan Africa?

Oddly enough, the radio. Basic, battery operated radio emerged as the most widespread, relevant and truly useful medium of communication all the way around.  It is useful to communicate not only to end users in the emerging world, but also to their friends and family here in the US and abroad. Basic radio. Go figure?

Willstream’s first move is to procure all of its end users, all three parties, via basic radio and related podcast programming.  It is as simple, and as complicated, as that.

 Introducing Paralocalism: Leveraging The Wizard of
Oz to Target Migrant Communities

“Close your eyes and tap your
heels together three times. And think to yourself, there’s no place like home…”

– Dorothy

Lizard Point

There is this very cool online game on lizardpoint.com, www.lizardpoint.com/fun/geoquiz/afrquiz.html that mercilessly
tests your knowledge about the geography of Africa. Confronted with an unmarked
map of Africa, the player is given about three attempts to identify the exact
location of each country or particular city in Africa, before forcing you to
move on from sheer guesswork.

When I play the game from time to time, I wonder how many Americans, regardless of their level of education, would actually accumulate a decent score on the game. No. Let me rephrase that. I wonder how many Americans, regardless of their level of education, would actually rack up any score at all on the game. My instincts tell me very
few indeed. 

Admitting What You Don’t Know

Consequently, after over half a year of our team tirelessly sharing the Willstream story with the US innovation community, both in New York and in Silicon Valley, a number of key concerns seem to consistently bubble to the surface about our company. And, while I will not bore you (yet) with the myriad of questions that are readily posed to our
team in this introductory blog post, there have been a few that serve as an
ever present subtext. These questions are pivotal to the complexity of user
procurement relating to a continent as large, untapped and complex as Africa.

During our conversations with domain leaders and investors, we find that even the most sophisticated technology industry veterans are completely unsure of how to approach the sub-Saharan African emerging marketplace with a new tech platform. Most of them
are self-aware enough, however, to admit this upfront; or at least, near the
front of our meetings.

It seems that tech industry veterans are unsure of the following with regard to sub-Saharan Africa: 1. Which technologies are actually needed? 2. Which ones will work? 3. Why will they work (or not)? 4. Who is the right team or company to deploy this given
technology? 4. How do we manage this tech team after we select them? And,
finally, 5. How do we further expand, maintain, control, leverage and interact
with our (3) users of this new technology once it is out there chugging away on
the African Continent?

 The User/Sender

It is for certain that Willstream is a watershed mobile payment platform since it deploys among three discreet users. The sender/user is my focus. She is the migrant. She is the individual living overseas, away from her homeland, sending her hard earned money back home for her family’s  healthcare and education. Consequently, my active goal is to drive her onto the  Willstream platform on behalf of her family back home because she has a need  for what we offer, and ultimately, she trusts that we can deliver on that. 

So what about Paralocalism?

Well, as noted in the beginning of this post, Africa is a huge Continent whose demographics are fairly mysterious to most Americans. Specifically, not only is the geography of the Continent complex, so are the intersecting matrices of people from, and even within, these many countries. All have incredibly diverging cultures,
religions, languages, ethnic and even racial backgrounds. Some of them are
even, yes, you guessed it, in ongoing conflict with each other. Therefore, the
resulting sender/user procurement methodology must be flexible and dynamic
enough to uncover both the intersecting and parallel norms that will capture
the attention of each migrant community one by one. Family by family. Person by
person. 

Paralocalism is the phrase that I developed to refer to the method
by which we formally roll out a user procurement strategy that uncovers and
then leverages these multitudes of demographic data points for the purpose of driving
the migrant, this travelling Dorothy, community online. Each country, each
community is different. But, they all deeply reflect the cultural norms and
values of their homeland, their local communities. Willstream’s user
procurement mandate is to discover the localized parallels – the pieces of her
old home that Dorothy holds dear in her new home. There is a yearning and a
connection between two places, something that holds them together. Willstream
seeks to tap that emotion in a soulful way and drive this user online to
connect with her family around the functionality of improving on healthcare and
education. Dorothy gets the control as she clicks her heels together.

The mandate with Paralocalism is to decide: what are the most alluring connecting features within each country or culture? Then how do we both unleash and attach these elements within the migrant paradigm in a way that is truly compelling and super
helpful.

So, as I see it, the migrant is essentially Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. She wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night thinking, “There’s No Place Like Home.”

Our goal at Willstream is to remind her exactly why this is.

“…once the Allmuseri saw the great ship and the squalid pit that would house them sardined belly-to-buttocks in the orlop*, with its dead air and razor-teethed bilge
rats, each slave forced to lie spoon-fashion on his left side to relieve the
pressure against his heart – after seeing this, the Africans panicked.  Believe it or not, a barker told us they thought we were barbarians shipping them to America to be eaten.  They saw us as savages.”

    -  Charles Johnson, The Middle Passage, 1990

My name is Adriane Stewart and I am not an African migrant.  I am an African-American. A black person. A Negro.  A Colored.  I am a living, breathing, human vestige of the most horrible crime committed by one race of people against another in the
modern era.

I am, in fact, a direct descendant of a survivor of the North American slave trade’s Middle Passage. I think about this incredible fact almost every day with a kind of
private amazement.

How did any human being, let alone millions of human beings, survive being packed head to crotch in the bowels of a filthy ship without food, light and little air for months on end?  And then, how did they rise from their confinement to face a new world of grief, solitude, forced labor, rape and beatings?

How?

Sitting in a cavernous and freezing cold conference room during the United Nation’s first US Summit on Migration and Remittance Flows on behalf of Willstream this past May, it dawned on me once again –Me, Adriane Stewart, I am not a migrant.

In fact, it has been said that the indigenous cohort of my ancestors actually walked into this continent, right across the ice mass that was once the Bering Strait. My
forefathers and foremothers literally trekked from the northern land mass of Eurasia into North America, during a time when I imagine there was an Arctic Pangea of sorts.

Dr. Johnetta Cole, the esteemed Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of  African Art spoke from the United Nation’s lectern about her deep Southern American roots during one of the UN Summit’s plenary sessions.  She cleverly wove a tale of her ancestors’ rise from slavery up to her prestigious posts as both the President of Spellman College and the Director at one of the most renowned historical institutions on Earth. Her mode of delivery was super, smart girl savvy and humorous.  The actual content of her jocular speech, however,was quite serious.

Consequently, Dr. Cole got me thinking.  She got me wondering about my own African
journey here in the US.

When I was a girl, my parents regularly took my brother and me to the Philadelphia Museum of African History.  While there were many varied exhibits over the
years, there was a constant series of blueprints that hung throughout the halls
that stuck with me. They were the charcoal blueprints of the slave ships that cut the Middle Passage from Europe through the Atlantic Ocean and on into the Americas. The drawings displayed line renderings of human beings “tight packed” into the cargo hold of a ship.  Folks were stacked on top of each other like some hay or pickle barrels, with their hands and feet secured with chains.  We were headed for the New World.

This is The Middle Passage. It  was most certainly not migration.