Blockchain – It’s Penetration in Africa

Image above is of Lusaka city, the capital of Zambia. Courtesy of http://www.postwesternworld.com

When one talks about Blockchain tech in Africa, one would probably get blunt and confused stairs. Perhaps you could change the question and ask about Bitcoins instead, you may get about 10% of the respondents at least tell you what Bitcoins are. Why does there seem to be so little information regarding Blockchain technology in Africa? A simple answer in my opinion would be that the current use cases are too technical hence end user adoption is virtually nonexistent save for a few counties such as Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Because Blockchain technology and Bitcoins specifically are internet dependent, it could be argued that a simple analytics search on Alexa.com or Google Trends will tell us the current adoption and interest in Blockchain technology in Africa. Figure 1 shows where in Africa people search for Blockchain.

Figure 1

It is interesting to see in figure 1 above that two African countries top the search popularity index.

Blockchain technology is approaching the exponential growth phase world over. Figure 2 below is obtained from a simple search on Google Trends.

Figure 2- Blockchain Interest Globally

As the world develops, adoption of technologies by continent has seen a dramatic reduction in the implementation times. We should expect Blockchain technologies to begin their diffusion into the African continent in less than 5 years. A study done at Dartmount College entitled “Technoloy Diffucsion: Measurement Causes and Consequences“ concludes that there are three main divers towards the adoption of technologies and these are knowledge, institutions, policies and demand. Therefore in order to drive the adoption of Blockchan technologies in Africa, we must begin with deliberate advocacy, lobby the financial policy makers to make laws that are favorable towards the use of Blockchain technologies in business and generally everyday life and finally, there just might be a demand for the technologies.