Wired on Friday: MamaMikes.com is a site run from the east African country of Kenya. It looks similar to a flower delivery website, or perhaps a mini African Amazon.
It sells online an elaborate range of goods for delivery - 40 roses, a crate of Tusker beer, or a mocha chip cake. You can buy monthly shopping certificates for Kenyan and Ugandan grocery stores, mobile phone airtime or a petrol card.
MamaMikes doesn't look like the internet transforming life in Africa. It looks like a pretty standard e-commerce site, down to the awkward mix of colours and fonts. But it's part of an online ecosystem that has a direct effect on the daily lives of Africans - even Africans that never use a computer.
A customer (typically in the US or Europe) goes to the site and picks from the list of products, which are basically gift cards. They give the recipient details, and businesses in Kenya and Uganda fulfil the orders.
The orders can be gifts for special occasions, but they can also be lifelines.
Despite attention from non-governmental organisations and western aid institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, it's the African emigrants that do most to support life and development in Africa. The World Bank reports that Africa received some $12 billion (€9.3 billion) in officially recorded remittances - money or goods sent home by emigrants - in 2002. The actual figure is probably much higher. But remittance isn't very easy or straightforward.
For sending money, Western Union has an unrivalled global network. But it has the fees to match it, taking a huge bite out of the currency flow. Also, remittance locations themselves are dangerous. There's only one reason why someone visits a money outlet in Africa, and often people leaving these offices are targets for theft and violence.
Even if you get past the fees and the danger, there's no way for the sender to make sure that the money is spent the way the sender intended. Slightly unscrupulous drunken uncles are a pan-cultural phenomenon, and every country loses the milk money to beer on occasion.
For most African nations, the cost of shipping needed items, especially items such as books, from Europe or the US is prohibitive. Yet the affection for family and friends and the power of small gifts sent back home mean the remittance market is huge. It's a market ripe for an online solution that cuts out the middle men.
Enter MamaMikes.com and easier net access for emigrants working in the developed world.
Purchasing a 4,000 Kenyan shilling (€40.35) supermarket shopping voucher with dollars costs you less than 9 per cent of your money, compared to close to 26 per cent with a Western Union transfer. Fuel costs are higher, and phone cards soar above a punishing 20 per cent for the euro purchaser. Still, it's cheaper than Western Union.
Land-line international calls in much of Africa can be €2-€3 a minute. Most African nations' telecoms are big, bureaucratic monopolies, notorious for high prices and terrible service.
Staying in touch with relatives abroad isn't just a family imperative in Africa, it's another remittance issue. Relatives who don't keep in touch don't send money, but the cost of keeping in touch can be so punishing that there isn't much to send anyway.
That's why the killer application of the Africa net so far has been Voice over IP, or VoIP. VoIP allows voice calls to be directed over the internet. It's an exciting technology getting a lot of discussion in high-power board rooms these days, and offers the possibility of getting all your phone calls for the cost of your internet connection.
Whatever the hemisphere, telecoms are concerned about the competition that flat-rate VoIP calls may provide to their own per-minute charges.
In many countries, telecom firms' pressure on governments has meant that VoIP is on shady legal ground, if not outright illegal.
But in Africa, VoIP servers are springing up as fast as solid internet connections are getting built. It's hard to say how motivated African nations will be in enforcing anti-VoIP laws: they have a lot to gain on a national level from the higher remittance and international profile VoIP will undoubtedly bring with it.
Those eager to solve the all-too-human problems of African poverty can't help but hope for a thousand MamaMikes, built on the internet, and bringing goods back to Africa, even as the prospect of cheap voice calls connect African nations to each other and the rest of the world. The resources may be scarce but the potential rewards for the isolated continent are vast.
And they have nothing to lose: the next VoIP innovation could come from the heart of Ghana's growing tech sector rather than the garages of Silicon Valley.
