The Impact of a Californian Ideology in Africa: How Silicon Valley ideologies about lean startups and nudge theory have shaped Africa’s development sector.

Abstract

Over the course of 2024, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the City of Los Angeles convened more than a dozen listening sessions in support of the city's development of its first-ever Africa Trade and Investment Strategy. The listening sessions brought new voices, perspectives, and geographies directly into the policymaking process. In support of these sessions, select scholars developed exploratory essays on California-Africa connections. These essays are meant to inform policymaking considerations and to identify potential questions for future consideration in developing and examining California-Africa connections. They are at once expert and experimental and attempt not only to shape policy but also to provoke additional scholarship.

Full text

The Impact of a Californian Ideology in Africa
How Silicon Valley ideologies about lean startups and nudge theory have shaped
Africa’s development sector.
Andrea Pollio
Series Overview
Over the course of 2024, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the City of
Los Angeles convened more than a dozen listening sessions in support of the city’s
development of its first-ever Africa Trade and Investment Strategy. The listening sessions
brought new voices, perspectives, and geographies directly into the policymaking process.
In support of these sessions, select scholars developed exploratory essays on California-
Africa connections. These essays are meant to inform policymaking considerations and to
identify potential questions for future consideration in developing and examining
California-Africa connections. They are at once expert and experimental and attempt not
only to shape policy but also to provoke additional scholarship.
Across the world, Silicon Valley is not just the moniker for the greater Bay Area of Northern
California. It is also a metaphor for the digital economy at large and a playbook for
replicating the success of the Californian ecosystem elsewhere. From the Silicon Plateau of
Bangalore to Shenzhen’s Hardware Valley, in alternative geographies of entrepreneurial
innovation lessons and models from the Bay Area are borrowed and readapted. In Africa too,
these Silicon Valley replicas abound: Lagos hosts Yaba Valley; Nairobi, Kigali, and Kampala
are Africa’s Silicon Savannah; Cape Town is the Silicon Cape of the continent. Much more
than just branding exercises, these nicknames also capture the aspiration that African tech
startups will accelerate economic development, create jobs, and address long-standing issues
of poverty and economic marginality. Ultimately, Africa’s innovation hubs articulate the
transformative promises of the digital economy. But how did this consensus over the Silicon
Valley playbook reach places as different as Accra, Cairo, and Lagos?
To answer this question, this essay reflects on the mobility of what cultural critics Richard
Barbrook and Andy Cameron famously labeled the “Californian ideology”—a shared belief in
the emancipatory promises and possibilities of digital technology.1 The Californian ideology
primes Silicon Valley’s narration of itself, but it also travels to unexpected places, including
the development field in Africa, where theories and fads from the Bay Area are radically
transforming market experiments with anti-poverty practice. Drawing on my work on digital
startups that, at once, pledge to unleash wealth and “make poverty history” in Africa (as the
mantra goes), this piece charts some of the connections between Californian and African
economic life, following mobile ideas about technology and entrepreneurialism.
Crisis of Development
In the fall of 1999, the so-called Battle of Seattle marked a watershed moment for the world
of international development—the system of financial assistance that has prescribed

economic policies and interventions in the so-called developing world. Students,
environmental groups, labor unions, and other grassroots organizations took to the streets of
the city to protest a World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting that was meant to
negotiate a number of new free-trade agreements for the new millennium. Less than a year
later, demonstrations moved to Washington, DC, on the occasion of the annual sessions of
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Even though protesters had
gathered under the banner of the anti-globalization movement,2 their critiques ultimately
addressed these Bretton Woods development organizations.
The demonstrators argued that development, the way it had been done by the IMF and the
World Bank, had served the interests of Western corporations and had done little to lift
people out of poverty. This view echoed the broader point that critical scholars of
development had made for some time: aid money flowing into infrastructure projects and
tied to structural adjustment (privatizations and cuts in state spending) had not worked,
especially in Africa. If anything, development had made poverty a matter of technical rather
than political intervention.3 Scholars were not alone in their critiques of development.
Already in April 1980, several African leaders had met on the Nigerian coast under the
auspices of the Organization of African Unity, a precursor to the African Union, and
collectively drafted the Lagos Plan 1980–2000.4 Couched with dependency theory—in short,
an interpretation that underdevelopment was convenient to wealthier economies in the core
of the global capitalist system—the plan was a public rejection of fiscal policies that would
later become known as structural adjustment and a call for delinking African economies
from the prescriptions of the Bretton Woods system.
The World Bank’s response to the Lagos Plan in the 1980s—best captured in the Berg
Report5—doubled down on structural adjustment, but by the 2000s, this was no longer
possible. A new paradigm was necessary, and both development organizations and so-called
developing nations embraced a philosophy of individual empowerment through
entrepreneurship.6 Even though many aid programs continued as usual, a new consensus
formed around the idea that more entrepreneurial forms of development were best suited to
address the predicaments of the postcolonial world. Microfinance provided the most
celebrated example: if poor people, especially poor women, were seen as entrepreneurs
worthy of financial assistance, then they could be helped to help themselves, and, in turn,
foster economic growth.7 This approach dovetailed with the writings of influential
economists like Hernando de Soto and C. K. Prahalad, who, in different ways, advocated for
the recognition of informal economies as cradles of frugal innovation and entrepreneurial
potential.
Ultimately, the crisis of traditional development practice inaugurated a period of new market
experiments in the Global South, and in Africa in particular. As anthropologists Catherine
Dolan and Dinah Rajak write, these experiments reflected “a shift in the wider development
industry from the grand schemes of macro‐economic restructuring and social transformation
that once animated national dreams of modernity, to the entrepreneurial individual as the
catalyst to human improvement and national growth.”8 One question, however, remained to
be answered. If development were to shift from infrastructure projects and macroeconomic
policy to empowering entrepreneurs, what tools, techniques, and technologies might be
needed to train people in Africa as entrepreneurs? To help them help themselves? While

economists like de Soto, Prahalad, and others had their own answers, another rejoinder
came from an unexpected place: sunny, boisterous Silicon Valley.
Californian Ideology and Airborne Devices
Just as the industry of development experienced its own crisis of legitimacy at the turn of the
millennium, Silicon Valley too had gone through its own waves of crisis and resurgence, first
in the late 1970s,9 and again in the early 2000s, with the dotcom bubble and subsequent bust
that wiped out many promising software companies. Throughout this time, a collective myth
of belonging and resilience emerged as one of the identities of Silicon Valley. This was “the
Californian ideology,” a unique blend of countercultural utopianism and free-market
libertarianism.10 Elites from the Bay Area promoted a view of the world that “promiscuously
combine[d] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the
yuppies.” At the core of it was the supposed liberatory power of technological advancement
and its capacity to fix social ills. More recently, this technological optimism has been termed
“techno-solutionism.”11
One of the forefathers of this ideology was futurologist Alvin Toffler, who built ideological
bridges between California and Washington, DC, when his mentee Newt Gingrich rose to
speaker of the house in the mid-1990s. More than a decade earlier, Toffler had skillfully
captured the zeitgeist of the early Silicon Valley days in The Third Wave, a book that
theorized human evolution across three waves of radical change, the last of which, paired
with the inevitable obsolescence of the state in the Information Age, was the ultimate end of
technological advancement. In one of the most discussed chapters of The Third Wave,
Toffler argued that connectivity technologies would allow poorer countries to “leapfrog,”
meaning to skip the industrialization phase and jump right into the Information Age. To
conjure this vision, Toffler described airborne devices that would bring connectivity to rural,
remote parts of the underdeveloped world. Fast forward almost forty years, these futuristic,
aethereal imageries became a real developmental project, with Google’s helium-filled
balloons bringing broadband internet to rural Kenya and other landlocked regions in
Africa.12
But aside from these anecdotal parallels, which are almost a caricature of the ways in which
the Californian ideology—quite literally—lands in Africa, there are other important reasons
why Silicon Valley’s cultures of entrepreneurialism worked well for the development sector
in Africa, at a time when other models of intervention were questioned. Up until recently, as
I have previously argued, neoclassical theories of static efficiency dominated the field of
development.13 With few exceptions, economists had little to say about entrepreneurs.14 And
they offered even less about how to turn ordinary people into incipient, risk-taking, job-
creating businesspeople. Therefore, when the development industry shifted its focus to
entrepreneurial empowerment as a catalyst of economic growth and anti-poverty, experts
did not have much theory to turn to, aside from the doctrines of neoliberal economists like
de Soto. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley evangelists had developed their own canon of writing and
thinking about what makes an entrepreneur. These works did not constitute a full-fledged
theory,15 but they consisted more of a constellation of managerial fads, self-help books, how-
to guides, and other reflexive manuals which, as a whole, made the point that
entrepreneurialism is not innate but needs to be nurtured and cultivated.

In other words, the techno-optimism emanating from Silicon Valley has reached the world of
African development in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, technology itself seems to
have the power to solve impossible quandaries. From solar lamps to water-purifying straws,
from the boxy computers of the One Laptop Per Child program16 to Google’s balloons, these
“little development devices”17 hold the promise of fixing broken systems in domains
purportedly dominated by chronic state failure across the continent and beyond. On the
other hand, coupled with the technological solutions are scores of potential African
entrepreneurs (and state planners) that could be trained using the same knowledge
mechanisms that produced several generations of Californian startups and tech giants. A
good example is the World Bank itself. In 2017, the development institution launched a pan-
African pilot accelerator, XL Africa, to scale up high-growth digital startups that were
providing critical services and generating revenue while creating employment. In a nutshell,
the World Bank copied the model offered by the venture capital firm Y Combinator—which
seeded well-known platforms like Airbnb, Reddit, and other tech giants from the Bay Area—
to foster developmental digital companies that, just like solar lamps, were meant to do well
(generate revenue) while doing good (creating jobs) in Africa.
Of course, the Californian ideology has pitfalls: for one, it is often conveniently blind to the
hidden costs and racialized pasts of Silicon Valley capitalism.18 Moreover, this libertarian
ideology is also willfully ignorant of the role that the U.S. state budget played in the global
ascendancy of Silicon Valley as the world’s technology capital.19 But this ideology, with its
tech-infused entrepreneurial optimism, mantras, and techniques, has still transformed and
influenced developmental economic experiments in Africa.
Running Lean in Africa
During my early research in Cape Town, I encountered a self-trained tech entrepreneur who
slept every night with a copy of Ash Maurya’s Running Lean on his nightstand. Inside the
book, he kept a folded printout of the “lean canvas,” a template that allows entrepreneurs to
apply the so-called lean method to their own companies (see Figure 1). He had filled out each
box of the template and kept returning to it as he dreamt of the hopeful future of profit and
social change that his startup manifested.
Figure 1. Lean Canvas Worksheet
Source: Lean Canvas is adapted from Business Model Canvas and is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Un-ported License.

Both Running Lean and the lean canvas are offshoots of the publishing machine initiated in
2008 by Eric Ries, who has since trademarked the concept of “lean startup” and become a
best-selling author through the eponymous volume. An entrepreneur and investor himself,
Ries is among the best-known evangelists of the post-dot-com-burst Californian ideology.
Specifically, through lean startup, Ries gave a name to a trend that had informed almost a
decade of new Silicon Valley companies emerging from the ashes of the tech bubble.
Borrowing a term that had been used by management scholars to describe the differences
between Toyota’s just-in-time production system (lean) and Fordist mass production, Ries
highlighted a shift in the approach of new digital ventures. As Toyota’s production manager
Taichi Ohno had done in the twentieth century, post-dot-com-boom startups had recognized
the need to better understand and track their mistakes and their customers.
Through a number of case studies, Ries offered a how-to manual for fledgling entrepreneurs
wishing to “turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn
whether to pivot or persevere.”20 In particular, Ries explained, the keys to a successful
venture were the constant experimentation and the careful measurements of each step,
especially through real-life pilots. From customer interviews to prototyping protocols, Ries
and his acolytes, including the author of Running Lean, developed a gamut of techniques
that were meant to help the startup journey of willful entrepreneurs. These techniques have
traveled the world of digital startups everywhere, but their reach goes even further.
Increasingly, they have been adopted by humanitarian NGOs, developmental organizations,
cooperatives, and social enterprises. After all, the lean startup closely aligns with the
practical need to foster entrepreneurial capabilities at both organizational and individual
levels.

A whole industry of lean development consulting has germinated from the lean startup
approach.21 Consultants, experts, and angel investors use these methods for all kinds of
training. They teach NGOs how to prototype technological solutions, how to test user
experience, how to validate financial assumptions, and how to garner data about the entire
process. At InfoDev, the World Bank’s platform for supporting small innovators in Africa and
other Global South regions, the lean startup is an official part of the curriculum. Entire
master classes are designed to teach the lean approach to African government officials. And
beyond the experts and the evangelists, the lean books are available to everyone with an
internet connection. Templates can be downloaded. The lean grammar is a shared language:
a Kenyan social entrepreneur can present their minimum viable product (MVP) without
doubting that a Silicon Valley impact investor knows exactly what an MVP is.
But why is the lean startup approach so powerful in the domain of development and beyond
the more restricted field of digital entrepreneurship? From one angle, it is easy to see how
these lean methods perfectly match the need to produce capable entrepreneurs who may
churn out useful technological solutions and create jobs where there is a dire need for both.
Yet, from another angle, the lean startup also responds to the desire to conscientiously
assess—through randomized control trials—whether development interventions yield results
in the first place. This experimental approach has been championed by many, but in
particular by Abhijit Banerjee and Ester Duflo, two of the founders of the Abdul Latif Jameel
Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an organization that administers metric-based tests to evaluate
if poverty-reduction initiatives, whether undertaken by the World Bank or the private sector,
meet their goals. “We need evidence,” they explained,22 and a few years later they went on to
receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Their approach consists of selecting
control groups and gathering accurate data about poverty alleviation experiments.
In other words, the lean startup and the J-PAL methods are remarkably aligned, even though
they come from different fields. Over many years of research, I have encountered several
organizations and startups that were trying to combine these two models to deliver profit
and social good.23 The lean startup, in their view, was a way of operationalizing the
experimental ethos of randomized trials and tracking their impact. As I have previous
written, “As a matter of fact, both approaches advocate metrics-driven, real-life pilots. Both
remark on the importance of understanding failures and pivoting before it is too late. Both
approaches are also predicated on a critique of technocracy. While Banerjee and Duflo
address the top-down perspective of development bureaucrats, Ries addresses the
technocentric mindset of software developers who do not understand future users.”24 And
lastly, as the next section outlines, both the lean startup and the J-PAL experiments are
ultimately informed by the developmental promises of behavioral economics.
Entrepreneurial Nudges
Behavioral economics, and the behavioral sciences more generally, have had a long and
fraught relationship with digital technology. The birth of modern computing and the desire
to model and influence social behavior through predictive algorithms are inextricably tied to
the winding history of experiments that runs from Cold War science to the consulting firm

Cambridge Analytica.25 Behaviorists recognize that the key assumption of neoclassical
economics—rational, individual decisionmaking—is fiction and that economic life teems with
social-cognitive biases. Understanding and measuring these biases, and therefore acting
upon them, are fundamental activities to create profitable markets. And with digital
technology offering unprecedented troves of data about how so-called target populations
behave, modeling human behavior is not a distant dream any longer.
One particular avenue through which behavioral economics has found its way to Silicon
Valley is the application of so-called nudge theory to the design and development of digital
products and services.26 Popularized by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein,27 nudge theory is
a practical application of behaviorism to effect changes in social and individual patterns, not
through imposition but through tweaks in the “architecture of choice”—whether in
consumer marketing or policymaking. Nudge theory, in many ways, is rife with echoes of
Californian ideology. Not only is it predicated on similar libertarian ideals, but also, it is
fundamentally a techno-solutionist approach. Unsurprisingly, nudge theory has many
champions in Silicon Valley and has found applications way beyond the imperative of
nudging customers. For example, Ries’s follow-up book after The Lean Startup, The Startup
Way,28 is a manual for big tech companies to nudge decisionmaking as an internal
organizational practice.
Ultimately, just like the lean startup, this Californian version of nudge theory too has
traveled to the seemingly distant sphere of African development. A turning point was the
World Bank’s World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior.29 In the
report, the bank takes stock of its many years of suboptimal results in anti-poverty programs
and argues that better interventions can be designed through a more subtle view of human
behavior; less neoclassical economics, more nudge theory, the authors of the report argue.
After all, “behavioral economics reveals that . . . poor people make mistakes that end up
making them poorer, sicker, and less happy,”30 and therefore making minor adjustments
that alter the choice architecture is an effective strategy to help the poor help themselves. Not
incidentally, this theory posits these small adjustments, as well as their effectiveness, can be
gauged and monitored through randomized control trials like those advocated by J-PAL—
even better if the adjustments have a digital component, since data become easier to capture.
As a result, a plethora of nudge theory–inspired experiments have proliferated in Africa.31
Combining the evidence-based ethos of randomized anti-poverty trials with faith in the
emancipatory power of digital technology, these experiments have shifted development
practices toward behavioral coaxing. And this is not, of course, just limited to humanitarian
aid. Increasingly so, nudge theory informs the business models of tech startups that, by
promising to address environmental and social issues, seek to access the trail of development
finance as a springboard to more sustained venture capital investments.
For example, my colleagues in Cape Town, Kigali, and Nairobi and I observed the
deployment of nudge techniques in the platformization of motorcycle taxis, a crucial urban
economy across African cities.32 Motorcycle taxi operators (called riders) provide a lifeline
for the movement of people and goods in the absence of public transport and more capillary
logistics operators (see Figure 2).33 One telling case study is the use of pay-as-you-go (or pay-
go) technologies in the financing of the transition to electric bikes. E-bikes (or the batteries
that power them) are expensive assets, and riders in urban Africa rarely have sufficient

capital to acquire such costly vehicles or to retrofit their existing ones. Nor do they have
access to traditional forms of asset financing, since getting a loan requires credit scores and
stable incomes—neither of which are commonly available to informal workers like
motorcycle taxi riders. For these reasons, there is an ever-growing number of startups that
apply pay-go devices to electric vehicles. Through these systems, riders pay back their e-
bikes in small daily installments. Without a daily payment, the bike does not even turn on:
users are coaxed into careful, everyday savings, just like the famous penny-in-the-slot meter
did with early twentieth-century working classes in the West.34 And the nudges do not stop
there. Pay-go technologies are, after all, Internet of Things devices that can track many other
aspects of drivers’ behaviors. These startups nudge their riders to respect speed limits, wear
helmets, work certain amounts of hours, and stay within certain geographic boundaries,
among other behaviors, in an overall attempt at derisking the transition to green mobility
(though such a transition is not without contradictions).35
Looking beyond, for a moment, the many problems related to pay-go technologies (which
often turn out to be predatory credit schemes), these startups also ultimately show the
pervasiveness of Californian ideology–infused experiments through which startups in Africa
create data-rich environments to create profit while, purportedly, improving existing
industries, decarbonizing urban economies, and addressing issues of poverty. Pay-go
schemes for green motorcycle taxis are, in my reading, the ultimate example of the
“solutionism” of the Californian ideology in Africa: a rush to digital experiments that cast
developmental problems as opportunities for profitable startups and recast the former
developing world not as a destination of technological transfer but as a living lab of
innovation.36

Figure 2 – Motorcycle-taxi riders waiting for their next gig in Nairobi, Kenya (Author’s photo)
Thinking Through Circulations of Ideas
This essay has examined how certain ideas and models of social change, informed by a
California-inspired technological optimism, reach the world of development and anti-
poverty in Africa. These ideas rest on the belief that innovation, entrepreneurialism, and
even technology itself may fix the fractures of a world scarred by colonial injustice and
unequal relations of economic power. Ultimately, even when or if observers are critical of
some of their assumptions, managerial and behavioral theories have also a life of their own,
circulating and being transformed as they are applied and experimented. New relationships
between places, new alliances, and shared grammars form out of these mobilities. In turn, I
would argue, these connections offer a vehicle for thinking about the inextricable lattice of
relations that already exist between geographies that seem to have little to do with each
other. More importantly, such existing linkages are also an avenue for researchers, policy
planners, consultants, activists, entrepreneurs, and other observers to reflect propositionally
about the stakes and the possibilities of these connections.
<H3>About the Author
Andrea Pollio is assistant professor of economic and political geography at the Polytechnic of
Turin, Italy, and research associate of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape
Town, South Africa. His forthcoming book, Nairobi, techno-capital: Global China and the

Silicon Savannah (University of California Press, 2025) traces the influence of Chinese
digital startups and venture capitalists in Kenya’s innovation ecosystem.
Acknowledgements
A small portion of this essay has appeared in another paper and has been readapted for this
essay. Thank you, Liza Cirolia and Ian Klaus, for reading and thinking together.
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