Brain Gain Or Drain?

 Africa, Kenya, Startups
Sep 012011
 

Africa’s got software talent… but for how much longer? What do African techies make of Silicon Valley? What might Silicon Valley make of them?

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Steve Mutinda: Kenyan App developer.
Photo Credit: WhiteAfrican

No Prada suits, hoodies or flip flops. No algorithms stolen off dorm room windows. None of that Social Network, San Francisco stuff. Steve Mutinda’s award-winning mobile health app may be designed for the global market, may end up slaying them in Silicon Valley, but, built in Africa by Africans for Africans, MedKenya comes out of a clear African sensibility — that’s its unique selling point.

"We want to showcase the potential of Africa in creating solutions that make a difference," explains the 29-year-old software developer from Nairobi. "We want the world to see that, yes, it is possible for Africa to be a net producer of solutions rather than a net consumer."

A one-stop shop for healthcare advice, the app squeezes out revenue from the realities around Mutinda: the technology available to him; Kenya’s most urgent healthcare issues; and, crucially, what’s considered affordable by ordinary Kenyans.

Subscribers to MedKenya pay to receive health alerts. Doctors pay to be included in its directory; the more alerts they write, the better placed their entry.

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(1061 words & 1 image, estimated 4:15 mins reading time)

 Posted by on 1 September, 2011

African Tech Joins Up

 Africa, Conferences, Kenya, Startups
May 012011
 

By developing its developers, Africa’s tech sector hopes to go from ping to kerching.

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Photo Credit: Sundhult

Time was when African software developers didn’t register on Silicon Valley’s radar. No undersea fibre optic cables meant that there wasn’t much of a digital infrastructure in most of sub-Saharan Africa and so accessing and developing its software market was tough work.

These days, with access getting easier, the African blip on the Silicon Valley screen is starting to ping somewhat louder: the world’s biggest technology companies can’t get enough of the right kind of African ideas.

Seeking solutions to African needs, the kind not generally grokked by Silicon Valley VCs, companies like Google and Nokia are working hard to encourage African developers.

They go into schools and universities. They set up apps markets. They help with marketing. They sponsor conferences. But the most obvious way, the one which gets the most attention, is via the kerching and bling of the apps challenge.

Going app?

US Dollars
Photo Credit: AMagill

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(1100 words & 4 images, estimated 4:24 mins reading time)

 Posted by on 1 May, 2011

We Are Here

 Africa, Crowdsourcing, Kenya, NGOs
Mar 012011
 

Visiting pop stars and politicians made it famous. It featured in the Oscar-winning movie The Constant Gardner.

But look at a map and you’ll strain your eyes trying to locate the tin shacks and mud huts of Kibera.

Although one of Africa’s more densely populated areas – some 250,000 people crammed into 2.3 sq km – the informal settlement shows up as nothing but “forest” in the Kenyan land registry.

The shanty town is just five kilometres south west from Nairobi’s city centre. Official maps pinpoint the Royal Nairobi golf course. But below this, there’s zilch, a big blank space where the Kibera slum should be.

Kibera 1 Kibera 2Mapping Kibera: Before and after mapping.
Photo Credit: Mikel Maron – Before, After

Determined to be seen, to put themselves on the map, Kibera’s residents have turned to a DIY tech solution.

Using hand-held GPS devices, trained volunteers are marking what they regard as important in and around the 13 villages which make up Kibera.

Their waymarks get zapped over instantly to Map Kibera, a digital map, part of a community news website built using open source software.

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(334 words & 3 images, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)

 Posted by on 1 March, 2011

Mob Rules

 Africa, Kenya
Nov 012010
 

Africa’s mobile phone kiosks: tech hubs set to rival Silicon Valley?

Ken Banks 1

Photo Credit: Ken Banks, Kiwanja.net

In the West, there’s an app for everything. In Africa, so goes the latest business/development mantra, there’s the mobile phone kiosk. The noise around Africa’s diy mobile phone culture sometimes sounds like a faint repeat of the dotcom hype from 1990s San Francisco.

However, Africa’s kiosks are for real: in the last decade or so, mobile phone kiosks have appeared everywhere, on every African city street corner.

They add up to entrepreneurial ecosystems buzzing with innovative goods and services, claim the business pundits. It’s an MBA case study scrawled across an entire continent.

Your phone doesn’t take multiple sim cards? Not a problem. African kiosk hackers are able to re-engineer your phone so that two cards can fit into one sim slot. Need instructions for the phone you bought up country? Don’t worry. Chances are that the kiosk’s clever geeks can download and print off the manual for you.

Ken Banks 2

Photo Credit: Ken Banks, Kiwanja.net

It’s innovation born out of necessity, suggests Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, the non-profit behind FrontlineSMS, free text-messaging software for Africa-based NGOs.

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(1144 words & 3 images, estimated 4:35 mins reading time)

 Posted by on 1 November, 2010

Fast Company

 Africa, Kenya, SME, Startups
Jul 012010
 

With the arrival of broadband, sub-Saharan Africa’s tech entrepreneurs are on the verge of take off. Question is: to where?

Computer cafe, Nairobi, Kenya

Photo Credit: White African

In Buea, southern Cameroon, the tech boys are pulling an all-nighter. Mambe Nanje Churchill’s fingers go hurtling across the keyboard. With his 20-year-old junior looking on, the 24-year-old self-taught veteran of the local cyber café scene deftly reworks a website banner.

It ain’t rocket science, but it pays.

Popular with students at the town’s university, the 60 or so cafés straggling along the streets on the green slopes beneath Mount Cameroon have become informal centres for incubating tech entrepreneurs.

The cafés provide a testing ground for novice techies. Regulars can pick up the basic tech skills needed to become front-of-house cyber attendants. Those sharpest at dealing with customers’ queries go on to become café managers. Those geeking out to the hardware become the network trouble-shooters. And the brightest and the best, those with an eye on the big dollar rewards, on emulating Silicon Valley, convert their tech know how into ambitious business plans.

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(1362 words & 1 image, estimated 5:27 mins reading time)

 Posted by on 1 July, 2010