“They deserve a credit” is what I
can say when i look back through time in early days of WhiteAfrican blog were
they come from and what they have achieved. I remember during my college days I
use to visit the blog and I was so impressed with the effort the guys were
putting in accelerating technology enhancement in the capital Nairobi, the
events, the projects and their coverage was just marvelous. Today we see a new
tech Kenya with a lot of innovative projects and hubs to incubate these
projects.
In just ten years number of
internet users in Kenya has increased tremendously from 200,000 in 2000 and now
we are speaking of more than 10 million internet users all over Kenya. The
impact of technology to the country can be seen even to the people who don’t
share the same tech background as the one who are practicing tech in their
daily life. Go online the quality of the Kenyan sites, the number of users of
social networking sites, the labs and hubs is the prove something is done and people are not just passionate about
technology but tech is what drive them in their daily life.
Kenya is going mobile; most of the
services can be accessed easily through mobile phone and handheld devices. The
money transfer service Mpesa is among many of the services people are using
which can be easily accessed through their mobile phone. The Mfarm projects forfarmers of the local communities are among the proofs of how tech is impacting
the community.
Recent have been a lot of tech
events TEDx, PIVOT and others, these all event are aiming at enhancing the tech
industry of Kenya, frankly speaking these are initiative we should all take to
improve the ICT sectors in our countries. From the World Bank report just
released last week the number of mobile users has just reached 6 billion most
of them coming from the development countries and most of them accessing the
internet and other materials using their mobile phones. It is the time we
increase production of more and more mobile based apps which would impact our
communities directly.
From the Open governance projects
to the research rooms in the iHub everything is just astonishing. The effort
put by World Bank and the Kenyan government to enhance ICT sector in order to
improve transparency and create opportunities for economic development seems to
be working. The Google office down in Nairobi is doing great just few weeks
back the Google student ambassadors from Tanzania were there and the stories
they brought back home was like “wow” they guys are moving let’s keep up the
speed with them. The Google Swahili event was great with representatives from
Kenya everything was just great.
Nairobi should not sleep with what
they have achieve, Kigali is moving in, in
Dar es Salaam people from KiNU hub and TanzICT they are moving fast to
take over the control of the ICT sector in East Africa the question that
remains what would be the next IT hub of East Africa? Don’t sleep guys the
challenge is already in the table .