The International Computer Science Institute
is pleased to present a talk:

Imagining an African Silicon Valley:
Prospects and Perils for Software Hackers in Accra, Ghana

Gregg Zachary Visiting Scholar, ICSI

greggzachary		hotmail.com

Tuesday, April 1, 2001 ICSI, Rm 607 4.00 pm - 5.00 pm

In the past 20 years, nearly every major city in the world, and many minor ones, have aspired to create their own centers of innovation. These cities were first inspired by the economic ascendance of California's Silicon Valley and, more recently, by the rapid emergence of the once-peripheral European cities of Helsinki and Dublin as centers of high-tech excellence. Government, business and society have interacted in different ways in order to give birth to innovation centers around the world. While results have varied, technopoles are fixtures of urban geography in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and the U.S. -- in short, everywhere in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. In my presentation, I will not examine why sub-Saharan Africa has proved inhospitable terrain for what Peter Hall and Manuel Castells have termed "technopoles," or clusters of information technology businesses. Rather I will examine the software activity in a single African city I know well and present two contrasting political-economic approaches as to how this city might germinate, nurture and sustain the first African technopole. In brief, I will imagine an African Silicon Valley and suggest some policies and actions that might help civil society, government and business to invent one.