By Sophie Mongalvy
In a four-story building on the fringe of Kenya’s capital, “Ninjas” and “Pirates” are working on finding solutions to problems. Problems like traffic jams, which sometimes get so bad in Nairobi that residents jokingly refer to them as free parking.
The young tech entrepreneurs, laptops plastered in stickers, dress casually and sit around big tables, on couches and sometimes on the floor at the iHub, a tech incubation center that has spawned 150 startups and created more than 1,300 jobs. Its corporate partners include companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel.
The “Ninjas” are the ones who develop ideas for products. “Pirates” are the people who go out and help raising cash for projects. Their building houses startup incubators, a user-experience lab, an under-construction hardware-development workshop and a community space.
“The importance of ecosystems like this is to create startups that then create jobs, that create value and that give back to the economy,” says Juliana Rotich, one of the trustees of i-Hub.
Together, the entrepreneurs come up with concepts like Ushahidi, the open-source software that’s used to share information and interactive maps to prevent conflicts and help aid agencies provide relief in disaster zones. Used in 31 languages across 159 countries, Ushahidi, which means testimony in Swahili, has been used in Haiti and Nepal after major earthquakes.
Kenya’s tech sector accounted for about 8.4% of Kenya’s GDP in 2014, and Rotich, one of the developers of Ushahidi, expects it to grow further.
“My personal mission is to make something of value, or work with people to make something that fixes a problem, and also to help others,” Rotich says. “That’s what drives me.”
Source: Bloomberg
