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Editor's note: Victor Asemota is a retired Edo farmer who has fallen into technology. He is a mentor for Google Launchpad Accelerator and the founder of Keita Capital, an investor in emerging market start-ups. He founded SwiftaCorp more than 20 years ago, an African pioneering group of software and technology services. Swifta is a Google partner for education and business in Africa. The opinions in this comment are solely his.
ACCRA, Ghana (CNN) – "Google is just a giant scientific research company that gets to make money", that was my first impression when I visited their offices at Mountain View for the first time.
I was not mistaken, much of what Google is doing is pushing the boundaries of human knowledge through research and discovery.
It is this curiosity that led them to create some of the most used technology platforms in the world today. also makes them the custodian of most data on almost anything in the world.
Google has also declared itself an "artificial intelligence company", and this claim will potentially change everything we know fundamentally. It will almost certainly change the way we live.
This change will also resonate for us in Africa; Google has just announced that Africa is acquiring a Google Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and that 's just the beginning. The laboratory will be headed by Moustapha Cisse, a Senegalese champion and expert.
Why Africa Dark?
This was in 2010 at the annual GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and Eric Schmidt's former CEO and President of Google was presenting his keynote where he was proudly talking about the growth of Android, Google's & # 39; 39; s new mobile operating system at that time.
He had a slide on the screen with lights showing the level of Android activations overall, but on this slide, Africa was bleak. Someone in the audience asked; "Why is Africa dark?"
Someone else repeated a similar question at another presentation at the annual Google Developers event in San Francisco in 2013. The presenter was talking about Cloud Platform from Google, and once again there was a global map where Africa was empty.
The question also arose: "What happened to Africa?"
Google did not seem to have activity in Africa from both maps, but the illustrations were wrong. They were already active in Africa, but they decided to take a different path.
Google has chosen to strengthen educational institutions by providing infrastructure and software, and from these institutions to build technological communities that have now reached their majority.
There are hardly any young software developers you would encounter in any of the major African countries that have not been influenced by Google's academic developer groups.
At the Barcelona keynote, someone also asked Eric Schmidt a question about plans for Africa and especially Nigeria?
With surprising precision for the CEO of a global technology company, he pointed to the problems badociated with last mile infrastructure and connectivity that hinder the growth and expansion of the Internet technology in Africa.
Google did not ignore Africa; they were trying to find a solution.
The solution has now taken many forms; mbadive infrastructure projects, digital skills training for millions, investments in the ecosystem of African startups and, more recently, the announcement of an intelligence lab Artificial in Accra, Ghana
Why Ghana?
The question everyone had after Jeff Dean (the Google AI team leader and Google Brain) announced that Google AI Lab was coming to Accra was "Why Ghana?"
The answer to this question has been clear for some time, but it has escaped most people.
When Barrack Obama decided to visit Ghana as the first African country during his presidency, it was the same question that most people asked – "Why Ghana?"
The answer is simple; Ghana is the future of Africa.
When I decided to leave Nigeria for Ghana almost a decade ago, most people did not understand why they had not visited Ghana and I fell in love literally.
I married a woman Fanti. I had already fallen for the country before meeting my wife because the place was different.
It did not have the market advantage of places like Nigeria and South Africa, but it was a place where I could live and work.
Ghana has relatively stable electricity, relative security and decent internet infrastructure. It also has some of the best tourist destinations in the developing world. All this is present without any hype. I've moved our stuff there and I've never looked back since.
This choice is despite the challenges that the country has gone through lately. I stayed and will continue to do it.
Google probably, however, has different reasons for choosing Ghana, and Jeff Dean has tried to explain that it had to do with the robust network of academic institutions as well as the infrastructure.
Google has been a major investor in strengthening these institutions and the infrastructure that surrounds it.
A subsidiary of the Alphabet named CSquared spun out of Google quietly installed an optical fiber backbone in Accra and Kampala to help solve the problem of the last mile of the internet that Eric Schmidt mentioned in Barcelona.
The Internet speeds I receive at the office and at home in Accra are now comparable to those in California.
Ghana has also become a crucible for education in the subregion over the years because of the relative stability of the system. country and the high standards of its institutions, such as Ashesi University, highly reputed.
The fundamentals of Ghanaian education are about the strongest in the region. It is not uncommon to see people from non-English speaking countries travel to Ghana to learn English and for their education.
There is also a stable education chain between Nigeria and Ghana, despite the historical ups and downs between the two countries.
Faced with the decline of the education system in their country, many Nigerian parents opt to send their children to school in Ghana.
Building African talent is one of Ghana's strengths, and its central location makes it a great hub business for those who want to expand to French-speaking Africa and the larger market from Africa – Nigeria.
The proximity to Nigeria and the relative health and organization are the main reasons why I moved.
Lagos is only an hour away.
Why artificial intelligence in Africa?
The global reputation of Africa has suffered over the years for many reasons. Hunger, famine, poverty and foreign aid are things typically badociated with Africa in the minds of other continents.
Conflict coherence and bad leadership have not helped either. Artificial intelligence in Africa seems to be an oxymoron in this context, but Africa is the last frontier.
Africa probably has more secrets about humanity than anywhere else in the world, and it is these secrets that "computer programming learns and adapts" (as Google describes it in AI) can help discover.
Interestingly, some of the best AI talents in the world are already of African descent. They work either on applied AI projects from Africa or many other developed markets.
One of these people is Omoju Miller, who has a Ph.D. in Cognition and Study and works at GitHub in San Francisco. According to Miller: "The African context is very different from that of Mountain View or Zurich: the innovations that Africa needs are related to the innovative practices we have seen come out of China, companies like Alibaba and Ant Financial, "she said. .
"These are companies that are inventing entire markets that serve the world, that's the kind of innovative thinking we need in Africa, Google AI can play a role in helping us achieve this", added Mr. Miller.
Miller is right; China does not sleep on AI either. The largest use of Google's open source machine learning libraries comes from China.
Many innovations are also being built with the help of Machine Learning. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are not only going to open the markets, but also help to create new ones.
Eric Schmidt, in a recent interview, mentioned that the majority market share models are now much more possible with AI
. It is now Africa's turn to do what China has done. The "African context" added to machine learning and artificial intelligence has the potential to bring new solutions to humanity and create new markets.
Google helps us achieve this by giving us their full support.
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