There are many problems we can readily identify in Africa that don’t require big data analysis to figure out what to do. But beyond the public relations value of IBM’s Lucy Project, I believe some new insights and solutions for Africa’s challenges may come from unusual correlations that come out of the data analysis.

And Africa’s problems cannot be addressed in isolation. So the data the Lucy Project needs to assess goes beyond the boundaries of the continent. It will be interesting to see where this all gets us in two, three or five years.

I recently watched a Michael Palin Sahara Desert travel special where he went to Timbuktu. The ancient remote city is on the upper Niger River in the Mali desert. Michael accompanied a camel caravan along with six Tuaregs trekking several hundred miles across the desert to pick up a couple thousand pounds of nasty evaporation basin salt to return back to Timbuktu. Total net profit after fourteen days of desert depreciation on ten camels, and about 1,000 subsistence Tuareg man-hours, must have amounted to less than $100. That works out to about $0.60 per day per man. Do we need Lucy to notify the residents of Timbuktu that clean granulated salt is available from the Morton Salt Co. for about 3-cents/pound through global commerce at the Senegal seaport of Dakar, from which rail connections extend to Bamaku on the Niger River. Barges can cheaply float a salt cargo down river to Timbuktu. Obviously a single Tuareg camel puller could invest only a few man-hours and contract to have fresh clean salt delivered to Timbuktu by barge for less than ten cents/pound. So then the question would be, once Timbuktu’s salt requirements are satisfied through rational means, what are we going to do with the ten camels and five unemployed Tuareg camel plodders?