Machine Learning in Africa

tl;dr: Algerians and Ivoirians are kicking some major Machine Learning ass!

Earlier this month, I shared the Meeshkan Machine Learning service with a friend from Côte d’Ivoire and his immediate reaction was “you have to get the word out in Africa.” I’m a big believer in enthusiasm, and he was genuinely enthusiastic, so we gave it a shot. We initially ran a small advertising campaign in four countries — Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Algeria, and Morocco. The organic growth from these campaigns has been much more promising than anything we’ve seen in Europe or North America. Why? Below are some musings.

Meeshkan — A short introduction

Meeshkan is an IoT service where people can convert almost any device into a client that executes distributed Machine Learning tasks. People are paid for the time their device is used. Meeshkan is currently in its public beta. You can download the app here and checkout meeshkan.com for more information.

Mobile culture in Africa

The first users of the Meeshkan Public Beta came from Africa and represent over 50% of our current user base. Algeria accounts for 33% alone!

As with any small company, it is difficult to determine if there is a statistically significant relationship between trends in one’s own data and more global phenomena. That being said, there are several reasons that Meeshkan’s early adoption in Africa is not surprising. Note that these reasons come from my own personal research and discussions with friends and colleagues, but no one on our team has significant knowledge about African economics. I am interested to hear what others think!

As CNN reports, there are major incentives for people in Africa to own cell phones. For many Africans, they serve as access to FM radio, as flashlights, as lifelines to health care and as banks on a continent without robust physical infrastructure.

The banking culture is particularly interesting, and is perhaps the one that is most linked to Meeshkan’s early adoption. For example, a 2016 paper out of Harvard’s Kennedy Center by Jay Rosengard shows a jump in Kenyan’s with access to a financial account from 45% to 75% in 2014. A report from The Economist claims that ordering a cab in Nairobi is easier via mobile than in New York. Diana Brazzell of the Huffington Post calls this phenomenon “leapfrogging” — jumping over intermediary technologies to go straight to the state of the art.

An advertisement for mfukoni, a popular banking app in Kenya.

A continent that has leapfrogged into mobile banking should, in theory, be ripe for leaping into mobile markets connecting buyers and sellers, which is what Meeshkan is. However, popular solutions like PayPal and Stripe only provide payout services for a limited amount of countries, almost all of which are in the top third of countries in terms of GDP per capita. So the mobile-first culture is, in my opinion, not enough to explain the early adoption rate. One major factor may be Meeshkan’s use of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency

African monetary units are notoriously unstable, and it makes sense that cryptocurrency would become a viable alternative for individuals looking to secure their assets. This is, however, a guess — I cannot corroborate this with any research. Most of my poking around in this area comes from the cryptoafrica.com blog. However, startups are already starting to hedge their bets on this idea. For example, KodePay is a Kenyan based startup bringing blockchain currencies into their local market. They have reported that they have already created partnerships with Kenyan banks.

Meeshkan currently uses Iota as its cryptocurrency of choice.

Meeshkan, as an IoT app, trades in Iota, a Distributed Ledger cryptocurrency that allows for fee-less nanotransactions. This is done by attaching Proof of Work to the transaction itself, where each transaction must approve two others in order to be approved. Meeshkan has recently approved its first transactions in Iota with African IoT sellers, although we have approved less in Africa than for other continents. So, while Africa seems ostensibly ripe for a cryptocurrency revolution, we have a lot of work to do to evangelize Iota and cryptocurrency with our African user base. We’re working hard on that and hopefully we’ll have good news about that in a future blog post.

Curiosity

The most interesting part of all this is that, to date, the only emails and tweets we’ve received showing curiosity about Machine Learning and/or the service are from Africa. We’ve been asked “what’s Machine Learning”, “will machines take over the world”, and “how much money to people make with Machine Learning” to name a few questions. We’ve pointed these people to various online resources and have responded with our own modest answers to these big questions.

The first tweet mentioning Meeshkan ever came from Africa! Effusive joy and minor debauchery ensued after seeing this.

All this has got me thinking — can Meeshkan convert sellers of CPU/GPU on the network to buyers of CPU/GPU? Meaning, can the service incite people to become practitioners of Machine Learning? This would be super cool for Meeshkan because we’re greedy and want more buyers in the system. But it would be even cooler for humanity because it would break the first-world hegemony over Machine Learning and make it accessible to all.

So, in the next release of the Meeshkan Android app, we’ll be providing a tab where people can explore Machine Learning. The tab leads to two resources: an RSS for trending news in Machine Learning and a link to the seminal Andrew Ng course where people can learn. We’ll be collecting analytics data to see how popular these options are and, if we find that they are widely used, we’ll explore ways that the service can convert Meeshkan IoT’ers to Meeshkan (non-)Machine Learners.