Frank Muscarello always knew his idea of an exchange for used IT equipment had legs in developing countries. But he assumed places like Uganda would be the ones looking to buy, not sell.

Not so, he quickly realized.

“Ironically, someone from Uganda was coming to sell a particular product,” said Muscarello, founder and CEO of the online exchange MarkITx, where buyers and sellers can find fair market prices for anything from a server to an iPad 2. He calls his company “the Kelley Blue Book of IT.”

It turns out it’s not so surprising that a company in Uganda was on the sell side. Even the most destitute post-conflict African nations have seen economic bright spots in the area of technology, experts say. Many Africans, for example, have been using mobile banking since they’ve been banking. And several regions have tried to stake their claim on the title of African Silicon Valley, with Nairobi, Kenya, standing out among the others.

“The level of foreign direct investment in Africa, especially in the ICT (information and communication technology) sector, has risen enormously in recent years,” Tim Kelly, lead ICT policy specialist for The World Bank Group, said in an email. “And it’s not just ‘Western investment’: China and other Asian economies such as Malaysia and Vietnam are heavy investors in the sector. Similarly, there is much more cross-African investment now.”

For Muscarello, 42, a Chicago entrepreneur who modeled MarkITx, in some ways, on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Africa’s emerging IT market wasn’t his main target. But as the company grows there, he’s realized the potential locked inside developing nations.

Here’s how his business works: say you’ve got 1,000 old PCs sitting around your office that you plan to replace. You list them for $300,000 and wait to see who wants to buy. MarkITx suggests a price per unit based on the condition and the market. A buyer comes along and places its bid in escrow. If the seller agrees, the transaction clears. MarkITx takes a commission, but also offers memberships.

It’s a great thing for organizations like school districts or companies looking to save on like-new gear, Muscarello says. “IT hardware is a commodity, so why not trade it like one?” In this way, it keeps sellers honest and gives IT buyers the same antidote to ignorance that Kelley Blue Book gave used car buyers.

Muscarello and his partners have raised the company’s inventory value from $9 million in January to more than $100 million now.

Information and communication technology has been a powerhouse in the Sub-Saharan African economy, according to an African Union and World Bank report from 2012. The annual compounded growth in that sector has been 40 percent in the decade after 2002. And “although mobile and Internet penetration remains relatively low in Africa, never before in the history of the continent has the population been as connected as it is today,” the report said.

Nearly half of all African residents have a mobile phone. And that includes nations recently ravaged by conflict, said Michael L. Best, a professor in IT and international development at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In a 2010 paper, Best spotlights Liberia, whose two civil wars, spanning 1989-2003, annihilated landline connections. Now, cell phones there aren’t just the primary telephone mode — they’re business tools, used for money transfers and productivity.

“In Liberia, they still have robust competition in the telecommunications sector, with owners that include non-Liberians in three out of the four operators,” Best said.

As Western tech companies like Microsoft, Nokia and especially IBM reach into African markets, as The Economist reported recently, investors expect government to become a main consumer for things like water and health care. Though as we’ve seen with the U.S. launch of a health care exchange, said Kelly, the World Bank policy specialist, “many countries have difficulties in managing government-funded IT systems appropriately.”

Management, particularly in private hands, is one of Africa’s hurdles; this equipment isn’t easy to use. Parts of Africa often find themselves on the receiving end of charitable IT donations, and sometimes the gear is out of date, mismatched, broken or just plain useless to the people who get their hands on it.

Here is a potential opening for Muscarello, of MarkITx. “In Africa, we think there’s a huge opportunity there,” he said.

He wouldn’t say which Ugandan multinational corporation surprised him by selling the equipment (buyers and sellers in his market trade in strict anonymity). But he says MarkITx has cleared perhaps 75,000 transactions with African parties in a little over a year.

Demand for IT is only poised to increase.

As more young Africans grow up with digital technology in their hands, more university students will arrive on campus with “ICT literacy,” Kelly said, though there’s still a gap between rural and urban areas and even between teachers and students. “That problem is caused, to some extent, by technophobia.”

“What Africa needs most,” writes Mayuri Odedra, a Kenyan academic, “is the ability to exploit existing products effectively, and this can only be achieved through education.”