Sure there are (many) problems -- but where there is a will there is a way. Eg South Africa produced Thawte which at one time had > 40% of the world market in

Sure there are (many) problems -- but where there is a will there is a way. Eg South Africa produced Thawte which at one time had > 40% of the world market in SSL certs. Bought by Verisign for $500m, allowing its founder (Mark Shuttleworth) to become the 2nd paid space tourist, to create an early-stage VC called HBD, and to move on to things like Canonical (Ubuntu Linux). At the time, played differently, it could have been Thawte that bought Verisign (but Mark did not have an interest in that). IIRC he is based from the UK these days (in part because of tax reasons), but very much maintains his ties to Africa. And Thawte is still based out of Cape Town. Arguably, all the "negatives" actually have an advantage, and African hackers can actually get to be really good -- because the environment forces them to innovate and be creative. (Which is why they can do things like build LEO microsatellites for under $5m -- eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUNSAT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUNSAT). There are of course several cases of (ex)-Africans founding successful companies in the USA (Paypal being a notable example) -- which is admittedly a little different. Arguably environment is just another "tool" in the entrepreneur's toolbox -- some will gain advantage by changing environment, others by exploiting uniqueness in theirs and finding ways to deal with the challenges. An interesting comment made once by Mark Shuttleworth, was that if a fashion company establishes in Paris (or a financial one in New York), it is immediately a challenge to be more than just average in that domain, to "stand out" as it were. He claimed this was a significant advantage for Thawte at the time.