During the Afrikoin conference in Nairobi, we were lucky to attend the Demo Day of the Savannah Fund, a Kenya-based VC betting on startups all over Africa. Because sometimes (even for me!), a picture is worth thousands words, I’ll just leave you browse this Slideshare. Startups are all working on local behaviors (gifting from the…
Tag: Africa
An education to entrepreneurship in Africa: from hack schools to long-term capability building in innovation
The story of Njeri Chelimo is a compelling one, and a case study for the proverb “where there is a will, there is a path”. This 20 y.o Kenyan girl had planned to attend a hack school in New York a few months ago. The 12-week program was free to attend, and would be a great…
A archeology of innovation and startups in Kenya with Mbwana Alliy from the Savannah Fund
As you may know, we were in Kenya both to attend Afrikoin, a conference on mobile money, and to continue our exploration of innovation ecosystems. How do countries, cities, are turning to entrepreneurship? What are the fundamentals and best local practices when they try to build and nurture communities of innovations? After Afrikoin, we had…
A brief history of Kenya mobile money system M-Pesa
During Afrikoin, the first mobile money and digital currency held in Nairobi, I’ve met with Brian Muthiora. Brian joined the local branch of GSMA, the telecom operators professional association, after 5 years at Safaricom handling the regulation issues for MPesa, the mobile money system designed by the Kenyan telco. And during an hour or so,…
E-commerce in East Africa: key findings from iHub Research team in Nairobi
The #Afrikoin conference is organized and hosted by iHub, Kenya’s famous and main innovation platform for web technologies. Their research arm, iHub Research, gave us a few insights on a research they have been running in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda) on e-commerce. The first e-commerce ventures in East Africa used to focus on affluent…
Africa is the future, but how to make it happen?
The quality and diversity of panelists and delegates of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit make it possible from Kuala Lumpur to learn a lot about distant innovation and startup ecosystems, as we’ve shown with these insights from Russia, Indonesia, New York. We’ve met also a lot of people from Africa, and have tried to connect as…