Earlier this year, Valery Colong Nyiwung lost $10,000 in just three months — almost 10 times the annual per capita income of Cameroon. And it wasn’t from playing the ponies. The only bet the tech entrepreneur made seemed to have winning odds: co-founding ActivSpaces, one of Cameroon’s leading technology hubs and an enterprise — naturally — that’s heavily reliant on reliable internet service. Nyiwung’s bad luck was to establish his company in a West African country where the government “requests” that telecommunications companies shut down the internet whenever it wants to stifle political dissent in certain parts of the country.

Good for repression, bad for business. And Nyiwung is far from alone in his predicament. According to the Brookings Institution, from July 2015 through June 2016, a total of nine internet shutdowns or network disruptions primarily for political reasons in seven African countries cost businesses there more than $400 million. That may not sound like much, but it’s an ominous trend on a continent where internet commerce is poised to contribute as much as $300 billion a year to the African GDP by 2025, according to a report from McKinsey & Company.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.ozy.com