Kenya - Silicon Safari

San Francisco has Silicon Valley, New York has Silicon Alley, London has Silicon Round and Tel-Aviv has Silicon Wadi. I think Kenya could have Silicon Safari*, and I'd love to be part of making that happen.

I never really thought I would go back to Kenya, but when I was back home this summer I had a strong feeling that it could be the forefront of innovation and entrepreneurship in Africa.

A little about where Kenya is today...
Kenya has about 30M people and a GDP per capita of $1,600 ppp Kenya is a leader in mobile innovation in the developing world. Kenya currently has a mobile penetration rate of ~ 50% and is forecasted to hit 90%+ by 2013. M-Pesa (mobile-to-mobile money transfer through text) was created here by Safaricom (part owned by Vodafone) and now almost $30M are transacted every day. This model has been replicated in many emerging markets which look to Kenya as a leader in emerging mobile products - particularly in banking and payments.

In October 2010, Barclays started offering M-Pesa to it's clients and we are not far from a place where mobile phone 'bank accounts' can offer most services provided by traditional banks which have a far lower penetration rate than mobile phones in Kenya. In September 2010, a major carrier (Zain) cut all call costs by 75% and all the other major carriers followed suit. With infrastructure capital costs already paid off, the market is highly competitive and consumers are getting excellent quality of service at constantly decreasing prices.

I'm not the only one who sees potential in Kenya... 
(work in progress)

• Techcrunch, Sarah Lacy in particular, did a piece in August 2010 about the possibilities of mobile in Kenya 
• Google opened their first non-sales office in Kenya in 2007 and is tasked with figuring out their entire Africa strategy

The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem is underdeveloped...

• Talent - Classic brain drain coupled with an underdeveloped local education system particularly in for technical talent is a HUGE issue. 
• Capital - There is little capital for early stage ventures and few investors on the ground who have the appetite and expertise to invest in entrepreneurs. The path to exit is also unclear with underdeveloped capital markets and low M&A volume.
• Community - We need to build a community for entrepreneurs and investors to find each other and share ideas and best practices. This is starting with initiatives like vc4africa, and Nairobi's IHub but these are still in their very early stages

What I'm hoping to do...

I moved to Silicon Valley to see how the most sophisticated entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world works. I am about to start working for an early stage start up, and am going to try and be as involved in the start-up community as possible. I want to learn as much as I can so when I do go home, I know what could be possible for Kenya.

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do or how I'm going to do it when I do return to Kenya, but what I do know is that I want to build technology businesses as both an entrepreneur and an investor (maybe some sort of hybrid incubation model would work best). The country needs pioneers for the field and I hope to be one of the people to build the bricks of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

* Silicon Safari is a term that I made up! Hope it catches on :) Silicon Savannah was something else I was toying with..