Tag Archives: economy

Book review – Africa’s Information Revolution

As part of the Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG) held in Oxford in August 2015 I was part of an ‘Author meets Critics’ panel which discussed the new book ‘Africa’s Information Revolution’ by James Murphy & Padraig Carmody.

Below is the commentary that I made drawing on some of the conclusions from our research at the OII. As I was taking the role of the critic, this commentary dwells on critiques for the sake of provoking discussion. But, the book definitely worth a read for anyone interested in examining issues around ICT and development, as well as those who are interested in the larger scale impacts of ICTs in developing and emerging markets.

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Discussing Piketty

In OII we recently had a discussion of the relevance of Piketty’s ‘Captal in the Twenty First Century’ on our work. Following this I wrote a summary of our discussions on the CII website.

For our inaugural discussion around “connectivity and inequality and inclusion” we decided to jump in the deep end and tackle the 600+ pages of Piketty’s much hyped “Capital in the Twenty First Century”.

Undoubtedly this work tackles important historical accounts of the distribution of wealth and the evolution of income across a number of Western countries since the early industrial revolution. However, we wanted to also probe how these portrayals of inequality relate to questions of technology and connectivity – and their significance in this….read full post

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The economic expectations and potentials of broadband Internet in East Africa

This is a cross post from Oxford Internet Institute’s ‘internet and policy’ blog – It is an interview with me and provides some insight on our work so far on internet connectivity in East Africa.

There has been a lot of hope and publicity about the economic potential of increased Internet connectivity in the East African region; including the hope of disintermediation and better connection to global markets. Chris Foster discusses initial findings of an OII project on Development and Broadband Internet Access in East Africa. Through surveys, interviews and in-depth observations, the project examines the expectations and stated potentials of broadband Internet in East Africa, comparing those expectations to the on-the-ground effects of broadband connectivity.

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Testing

Yes, it works

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