Thursday evening last week brought the best minds in the ICT industry in Kenya at one location once again. This time, the event was held at the iHub innovation center in Nairobi. In attendance were members of the iHub community, Mobile application developers and entrepreneurs in Kenya.
Bobby Collymore, Safaricom Limited CEO, was on point to describe the role that Safaricom was playing in the promotion of mobile development in Kenya. He went on to state that Safaricom was for the first time introducing the internet to a majority Kenyan’s by providing devices that supported mobile internet connectivity.
An Mpesa-enabled application that can track pregnant women with the help of a health worker was also reported to be available on Safaricom’s Daktari 1525. Daktari 1525 is a medical advisory service that gives you access to medical advice from a doctor by dialing 1525 on your Safaricom line. It was also said that Call-a-doc, M-pedigree and other institutions were going to equip more than 20,000 health workers to help support the health initiative.
Young entrepreneurs at the event raised the concern of intellectual property rights as they shared their applications with organizations and the community at large which raised the question of whether developers were more interested in protecting their ideas or simply making money. The participants also urged Safaricom to spend more time at technology hubs in the country in order to keep in touch with the community. Safaricom so far supports and funds training and incubation facilities at the Strathmore University.
Attendees also sought to demystify the idea that innovations were only possible from Nairobi by explaining that Kenyans in other parts of the country were also coming up with great tech innovations. As for devices, Safaricom set tone for the industry by saying that focus would now be directed at smartphones after the usage of android grew massively over the last two years. A service delivery platform that would support developer applications would be set up.
The Mobile industry in Africa has now reportedly overtaken Latin America to go second with the largest mobile industry after Asia. Contributions of the Industry to the economy are said to be $ 56 Billion which represents 3.5% of the continent’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) according to the GSMA Africa Mobile Observatory group.
