Ups & Downs of Being a Kenyan Web Entrepreneur
June 27, 2008 at 11:54 am
Reboot tends to be an almost exclusively white affair, so it was with great delight that I kicked off day 2 listening to Segeni Ng’Ethe of Mamamikes.com tell us about the ups and downs of running an internet business in Kenya.
Mamamikes facilitates payments from Kenyan expats who want to transfer vouchers back home. Check out their youtube vid.
This can be practical gifts eg. Shopping vouchers, electricity bill, sentimental gifts like roses, cultural gifts eg. Cow (to your granny!). I think that’s a great idea because it overcomes the difficulty of sending money to a home with perhaps an alcoholic parent. They’re seeing a huge growth in vouchers for mobile phones. And ring tones are huge – of local music of course!
In Africa, the mobile phone is the primary communications device because many people don’t have laptops and the bandwidth required to connect them to the internet. As a result, more SMS’ s are sent per day in Nairobi than in New York City. And kids are addicted to Facebook there just as they are everywhere, the only difference is that Kenyan kids access it by mobile phone.
What’s it like to be an entrepreneur in Nairobi?
Challenging. The Internet is still a growing concept in Kenya. Bandwidth is difficult, so you’ve got to plan around that – for example, my email is set up so that everything with more than 1.5mb goes straight to the server, because it would block every other email coming in. When you’re planning on uploading development or even just a simple youtube you’ve got to plan in advance.
Internet Costs in Kenya
56k connection speed costs $400 per month. Now they’ve moved to satellite, they have hooked up with others in their building and now pay $150 for 128k connection. There is no fibre in Kenya. But it has become political, and is on the agenda, but don’t be expecting too much too soon. (Sounds like Ireland)
Recent Violence in Kenya
How the phone was used and his service during the violence in December. What happened was that the elections socialised people to be tribal. So when the results came out, people went to war.
• If there’s violence in your area, people were asked to send an SMS. This was then added to a Google Map so people could see where the flashpionts for violence were.
• Crackdown on tracking hate SMS’s including viral
• Scratch card for phone credit is distributed physically. When the fighting was on, people were unable to leave the house and the shopkeepers weren’t there. Showed the people how reliant they were on the phones. Mamamikes was used by people sending credit to loved ones.
What he expects in the coming years from Africa is innovation the way phones are being used.
It’s like the phone is our version of the internet.
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