I think encouraging foreign investement is an excellent idea. Their success would encourage a broader audience of local investors to pay closer attention towards tech. Competition (and success) would have the ability to generate a huge interest in this area.

Creation of a boards of regional tech experts that could help vet the ideas coming out of their region and then present those they deem most feasible to foreign tech Angel firms would be one way great way to accelerate foriegn Angel investement.

Angel investment much more than VC investment is what we are missing. Only 1 out of 1000 startups from Angels will have a great exit, and only 1 out of 1000 startups from VC’s will go public. So what we need to focus on is to get a thriving Angel investement community going and the VC’s will follow.

great post. i think we need some success stories. we need to show people its possible. that a little support actually can make a difference and allows an entrepreneur to move from idea stage to market. once we have these stories we can really get the ball rolling……seeing is believing!

would be great to start working towards solutions. vc4africa is a small attempt to bring people together around these issues. we are growing a community of investors and entrepreneurs dedicated to getting projects off the ground. if anyone here is interested in such a task, come check it out and drop a line! i am sure that just the group of people who have responded to this post can make the difference.

ben

“This morning Morris Mbetsa met to PS Ndemo from 7:30 am to about 9:00am and demonstrated his softwares. And we never managed to go through all the applications!

The PS shared endless opportunities he foresees for this locally developed software. Offered his personal support towards making it a reality, fast!! Watch this space…

It struck how we have bubbling innovation from the ground up and it’s about time it was set free, nurtured to flourish and really changed this country.”

When most people hear about investing in an idea, they skip all the stages of a venture’s growth and look at the IPO/sale of the business. Morris for example, might need to employ an intern to help, office space, and more equipment to take his prototype to a scale that is more attractive. This is an easy buy-in for a person who can tap into his vision and see how this can be applied in many areas of both business and society. [He could use more examples other than the Kenya Police]

There is a niche area that small VCs/individuals can obtain by backing ideas that are viable and scalable from the get go. If you look at it down the line, you will realize that in the end, bigger investors will back an idea in latter stages because it is coming from “so and so”. You build a brand (fostered by trust) that ideas backed by you/VC/fund has a high chance of making it ‘big’.

The danger of waiting for the idea to look viable so as to invest your tens or hundreds of thousand of shillings is that by the time Morris (& others like him) make the idea attractive to you, the amount of funding they are looking for is beyond your reach – the tables turn against you.

I am with ‘lilious’ on crowdsourcing but not the Kiva way. Check out Kluster (http://www.kluster.com/) – this would be one way of doing it, especially with Kenya’s lackluster CMA guidelines (sometimes you have to take advantage of the loophole, apologize later and then help in shaping that policy after seeing how it works).

It is clearly the way to go to obtain the small amounts of seed money that Morris needs to make his prototype go to the next level and attract an even bigger purse.

Secondly we need our owns secluded business park in athi river with uniterrupted supply of power and broadband. We can always look for VC’s or money after that.

In the mean time anyone needing early growth support can buzz me at JohnKaranja.com

@lilious – interesting, and it might be possible. It gets points for creativity, and I wonder if anyone can tell us if there is something like that in the works. If so, I haven’t heard of it.

@zulusafari – Agreed overall. The gov’t should really be creating ways to make it easier for investment and entrepreneurship to happen. What we don’t need is more restrictions and stifling in this space. Also, in the areas that are directly related to gov’t (like Morris’ recent app), the Kenyan gov’t should be looking at it as an investor.