Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Will Kenyan techies create a silicon savanna?

The silicon savanna, was a headline in one of the articles appearing in the Time
Magazine on June 30. The article basically asked if Kenya was on the brink of a technological revolution, akin to the Silicon Valley one. The article pointed out several factors for this assertion.
For instance, when Google was looking for a headquarters for its operations in Africa, it didn’t go to South Africa, Africa’s economic powerhouse. It instead came to Nairobi, Kenya to set up its shop. Similarly, when the world’s superpower was looking for a solution to the Haiti earth quake disaster, it used ushahidi, a disaster monitoring website. Similarly, M-PESA, the mobile money transfer service was first unveiled in Kenya by Safaricom and Vodafone.
The mobile revolution in Africa has caught many analysts by surprise. In Kenya, there are about twenty million phone subscribers. In fact, Safaricom, the most profitable company in East Africa is a mobile service provider.

It dethroned such firms as EABL and Bamburi as the most valued company at the Nairobi Stock exchange. It is now valued at about 3 billion dollars. And just last week, the government unveiled an internet portal, which will make government information available to ordinary Kenyans. It may be too early to celebrate, but the signs are already there.
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