IDEP Working Papers - Which big data for Africa ?

The amount of digital information in the world is growing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. With the Internet-of-Things, this will move even faster. In 2012, there were less than 9 billion devices connected to the internet. In 2020, some say this number will be more than 50 billion. In 2025, McKinsey expects this number to have increased to 1 trillion. All these devices will be connected; all will be sending data to the cloud. Buckminster Fuller indicated that in 2015, mankind produced as much information as was created in all previous years of human civilization. Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve” where he noticed that until the year 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century and that by the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. According to IBM in the “Toxic Terabyte” publication, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.