Alibaba chief launches African fund for ICT, e-commerce entrepreneurs

Ma said he will launch partnerships with African universities as part of a $10 million African Young Entrepreneurs Fund he has founded, with the backing of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

In terms of the fund, Ma, who is a special UNCTAD adviser for youth entrepreneurship and small business, told a conference in Rwanda: “The money is set. This is my money, so I don’t have to get anybody’s approval.” Ma said he was poised to hire staff for the fund, which is set to begin operations this year.

According to UNCTAD, Ma said he would also work with the UN to take “200 budding African businesspeople” to China “to learn from Alibaba hands on”.

“I want them to go to China, meeting our people, seeing all the things we have been doing, all the great ideas China has,” Ma said. “They know what they want. And when they know what they want, we can support it.”

Ma, who visited Africa for the first time towards the end of July 2017, told of his experience in building his company, founded in 1999, into a global e-commerce giant valued at more than $231 billion. He said internet access was “an even more important raw material for economies than coal and electricity were in the past”. “Not being connected to the internet today is worse than not having electricity 100 years ago," he said.

“I think e-commerce, internet, Big Data is the future,” Ma said. “You can never stop it. You like it or don’t like it. But you will never stop it. Every time you have a technological revolution, it will kill a lot of jobs and it will create a lot of jobs. This is what history tells us.”

UNCTAD said it is working with Ma “to explore opportunities with African businesses to participate in global trade, as well as to raise awareness of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (41-page / 368 KB PDF), which was adopted by the international community in 2015”. In addition to his role as an UNCTAD adviser, Ma also serves as a UN ‘sustainable development goals advocate’.

The African Union’s ‘action plan’ for Africa for 2010-2015 (104-page / 1.53 MB PDF) said access to advanced ICT was critical to the long-term economic and social development” of the continent.

In 2015, South Africa’s government entered into a 10-year partnership with IBM South Africa as part of a “research, development and innovation deal” to step-up investment in the country’s ICT infrastructure and boost training. Science and technology minister Naledi Pandor said the research programme would be centred around the establishment of an IBM research laboratory in Johannesburg to “focus on advancing smarter decision making, analytics, cloud, and next generation infrastructure”.

Analysis published last November by market analysts Ovum forecast that the total number of mobile subscriptions in Africa would rise to 1.33bn at the end of 2021. However, Ovum said data connections as well as data and digital service revenue, “will drive the next phase of growth in Africa’s telecoms market”.