Beyond Unicorns: Should Africa Measure Technology by the Abundance It Creates?

Africa's technology industry loves numbers. How much did a startup raise? Has it reached a billion-dollar valuation? How many customers does it have? What is its revenue?
These are important measures of commercial success, but they do not capture everything technology creates.
Open-source software can provide valuable capabilities without charging every user. Automation can return thousands of hours to workers without generating a transaction each time it performs a task. A reusable digital system can help developers build something new without its original creator receiving another dollar.

The Jamaican-Brazilian Trott Bailey Family wants technology to be considered through this wider lens. Its Big King Media project grew from a practical problem managing a huge WordPress media archive and eventually became part of the family's broader argument that technological wealth can also be measured by the capabilities an invention makes possible.

What if Wealth Is More Than Money?

The Trott Bailey Family describes itself as the world's wealthiest family, but that statement requires an important qualification. It is not a conventional claim about audited net worth, cash, shares or assets. Instead, the family uses its own framework, called Wealth Authorship, to consider the value of useful capabilities it believes its work has helped create.
The philosophy connects to what the family calls Abundance Theory: once something useful exists, how many people can benefit from it, how frequently can it be reused and what additional capabilities can others build from it?

Software makes that question particularly interesting. Giving another person access to a piece of code does not normally deprive the first user of it. Knowledge can be copied. Open software can be modified. One developer's work can become another developer's starting point.

For Africa, that isn't merely philosophical. The African Union's African Digital Compact encourages member states to support open-source software and digital public goods that can be adapted and reused, partly to improve interoperability and reduce costs.

Big King Media Started With a Storage Problem

Big King Media was developed around a Trott Bailey Family WordPress multisite archive approaching 100,000 media files, according to the family's account. Managing that amount of content created problems beyond storage: duplicate uploads, repeated metadata work, disconnected media libraries and finished videos that became difficult to modify without rebuilding them.

Big King Media attempts to turn that archive into reusable infrastructure. Among its features are network-wide media sharing, duplicate detection, provenance tools, browser-based Dynamic Movies and systems designed to automate repetitive media work. Rather than organising the project around converting every user into a customer, the family distributes Big King Media under what it describes as its “Sovereignly Free” model. Some aspects of its architecture have also received examination outside the family's own websites. Visualmodo's technical examination of WordPress multisite media sharing describes Big King Media's approach to exposing network-wide media without simply creating physical duplicates of every file. WP Mayor has also included TBF Big King Media among WordPress media-library tools, particularly for multisite shared-media use.

TechView Africa went further by examining the project's source code and architecture in its review, We Opened Big King Media's Source Code: This Free WordPress Media System Is Far More Serious Than We Expected.

But Can Millions of Free Downloads Be Called Wealth?

The Trott Bailey Family says its independently distributed Big King Media plugin has recorded more than 4.72 million downloads. But the claim raises a useful question even without accepting the family's proposed valuation framework.
If a free piece of software saves a school money, helps a publisher avoid duplicated storage or allows a developer to build something faster, economic value can exist even when no payment occurs.

That distinction is particularly relevant to Africa. A 2026 BCG analysis argues that open-source systems can help African economies reduce vendor lock-in, improve adaptability and retain technical expertise locally. It highlights OpenMRS, an open-source medical-record system developed in Africa that is now used at more than 8,100 health facilities across over 80 countries, managing records for more than 22 million patients. Africa is already producing examples of this model. GitHub maintains an entire Made in Africa collection highlighting open-source projects created by African developers to solve local and global problems.

Africa May Need a Second Technology Scoreboard

None of this means Africa should stop measuring investment, profitability, exits or billion-dollar valuations. Companies need sustainable business models. Developers need salaries. Servers cost money. Even free software needs maintenance.

But financial performance can sit beside another set of questions. How many people gained a capability they previously could not afford? How much repetitive work disappeared? How many African engineers can inspect and modify the technology themselves? How much knowledge remains locally available? How much foreign software dependence has been reduced?

Those questions increasingly overlap with Africa's debate about digital sovereignty. Carnegie Mellon University Africa's Upanzi Network, for example, is developing and adapting digital public goods with an emphasis on technologies suitable for resource-constrained African environments. Meanwhile, researchers and policymakers are increasingly examining open infrastructure as a way of reducing dependence on proprietary systems that countries cannot easily modify. That does not mean “free” automatically equals better. Open technologies still require cybersecurity, governance, funding, skilled maintainers and long-term support. Research into digital public goods in Africa has specifically identified sustainability, technical capacity, localisation, privacy and interoperability as continuing challenges.

Technology Should Give People Something Back

One of the Trott Bailey Family's more interesting ideas is what it calls Human Time Return.
The argument is simple: if machines become better at repetitive work, technological progress should partly be measured by how much human time those machines return. That principle extends well beyond Big King Media. AI agents that automate paperwork, open-source systems that prevent African governments from repeatedly buying similar software, agricultural technology that reduces manual labour and educational platforms that make scarce knowledge widely available all create forms of capability.

A billion-dollar valuation remains an extraordinary technological achievement. But perhaps it should not be the only finish line. For Africa, the next important technology company may certainly be another unicorn. It could also be an open system used by millions, an African-built technology that becomes infrastructure for thousands of businesses, or software that allows the next generation of developers to build without starting from zero. The more useful question may therefore be not simply “How much is this technology worth?”

It may also be: What became possible because this technology existed?

Editor's disclosure: This article was adapted for Afritech Connect from a guest feature submitted by the Trott Bailey Family. Claims relating to the family's proprietary Wealth Authorship framework, its self-description of wealth and Big King Media download figures originate from the family and should not be interpreted as independently audited financial or usage figures.

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