Hubs vs. Incubators: What Are the Pain Points for Impact and Efficiency?

With tech entrepreneurship on the rise across Africa, efforts to support the agenda are evolving and diversifying. There has been quite a bit of debate—sometimes of the heated kind—about whether incubators, hubs, labs, and other support organizations work. In my… Continue Reading

Tracing employment rights through online labour markets

Online labour markets represent a rapidly growing feature of the world of work. Dozens of international online market places exist for the buying and selling of labour. The number of hours worked on oDesk.com (now known as Upwork), a leading… Continue Reading

Kapuścinski Public Lecture – “Uneven Geographies of Power and Participation in the Internet Era”

I recently had the opportunity to give a Kapuścinski public lecture titled “Uneven Geographies of Power and Participation in the Internet Era.” You can watch the whole lecture at the link above. For anyone interested in more about the topic, the following… Continue Reading

“Towards a study of information geographies” A full list of our maps

We very recently published a paper that brings together a lot of the internet mapping work that we’ve been doing: Graham, M., S. De Sabbata, and M. A. Zook. (2015) “Towards a Study of Information Geographies: (im)mutable Augmentations and a… Continue Reading

New paper – Towards a study of information geographies:(im)mutable augmentations and a mapping of the geographies of information

Our research group spends a lot of time mapping the internet and the digital information that flows within it. So we decided to attempt to bring together a lot of that work into a single (open access) paper: Graham, M.,… Continue Reading

Incubators vs. Hubs at the Example of Accra

Use of the term “hub” has certainly been inflationary in discussions about innovation and entrepreneurship support. I believe that innovation hubs are a genuinely new (and exciting!) organizational form, but at the same time, “hub” has become a misnomer for… Continue Reading

New paper: “The Domestic Turn: Business Processing Outsourcing and the Growing Automation of Kenyan Organisations”

I’m happy to announce a new paper to come out of our previous project studying Development and Broadband Internet Access in East Africa. The project was a collaboration between myself, Tim Waema, Laura Mann, and Chris Foster and aimed to… Continue Reading

Harare’s Hubs: Excitement, Experimentation, and Many Open Questions

During the interviews I conducted in Zimbabwe last October, many participants asked me: “Why pick Harare as a case study? Why not Nairobi or Lagos?” Indeed, Harare’s “ecosystem” is nascent, and the few tech startups that exist are hampered by… Continue Reading