Interviews

Ruud Elmendorp is a well-known freelance videographer in East Africa, and someone I have been meaning to meet-up with while there. Last month while in Nairobi we finally got to link up for a coffee and discuss a little about his business and the kinds of stories he does. When you get a chance to talk to someone who has interviewed the infamous Joseph Kony in person, you don’t pass it up!

Interestingly enough, six years ago he decided to just pick up and move to Kenya to begin his business. It came after having done some work in Southern Sudan, and at a time when life beckoned for him to leave the Netherlands behind. It’s how a lot of first-timers get to Africa, for some it sticks and they thrive, others it breaks them.

Of course, we got started talking about equipment, me showing my little Sanyo Xacti vpc-E1 (an ultra-small waterproof video camera), and I swear I saw a little drool escape him at that point… It’s good to know he’s another gadget-head, and was neat to see how he used his mobile phone for a lot of his work (Nokia E-51).

A Video by Ruud

Here’s a recent video showing MTN’s Village Phone Project in Uganda:

‘I never expected to start a business.’ The 49-years-old Nakakande Uvumba got herself a Village Phone, where people can make cheap phone calls. 15,000 others in Uganda have a new future.

Interesting Facts

Ruud is the national correspondent for RTL (Netherlands) and a regular field correspondent for Rocketboom. He also runs the booming Facebook Videojournalist group.

One of these days I’ll be able to afford Ruud doing an AfriGadget documentary. Until then, I’ll enjoy his videos - doing stories that are interesting and always compelling.

Note: the funny picture above was taken using the Xacti video camera’s still image capture (6 Megapixel). Needless to say, Ruud wasn’t quite ready for it…
(hat tip to James Neal for jogging my memory on this story)

Every once in a while, in this line of work, you get a genuinely welcome and unexpected surprise. That’s what happened the other night when I met up with some local tech guys and a certain Steve Mutinda showed up just happening to mention that he did some J2ME programming. He has created two mobile phone apps (and working on a third), which I’ll review over a couple of posts.

In brief, LiveQuotes let’s you track the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) from your GPRS enabled phone.

The NSE updates their data every time a trade happens, and that information can be downloaded as a CSV. Steve has it setup so that he checks it every minute, allowing you to have near real-time access to the exchange, and a scrolling ticker for your selected portfolio. Want to see how your stock has done over time? No problem, there is a basic line chart showing how your shares have done historically.

Steve started this about 3 months ago, soft-launching it to a few friends as he worked on new features and fixed things up. So far there are 200 users. I would expect that to change soon. 800,000 Kenyans have just bought into the Safaricom IPO was his inspiration, and a good one because it means there are hundreds of thousands of new stock owners in Kenya.

While it’s fee right now, plans are to charge 30/= Kenya Shillings per week ($0.50 cents) per user. Anyone can receive the application through a simple SMS with a link to the URL, and then registering on the spot. Safaricom or Celtel (depending on which carrier the end user has) will act as middleman for transactions, paying Steve on a monthly basis.

A little math will tell you that by getting just 10,000 users he will make about 300,000/= per week ($4,665). $18,000/month is a nice salary by almost anyone’s standards. I’ll be asking for a loan from him soon, I hope.

What else is in the future? Uganda and Tanzania for one, possibly the rest of Africa if things go well. On the technology side, look for some type of API that will allow others to access the same pre-parsed information.

See it in action in the video below:

Below is a question and answer (through email) that I had with Andi Friedman, who heads up Populi’s Mobile Researcher product. Standby for some really interesting thoughts on the mobile landscape in Africa. (read Part 1, with background on the Populi platform, here.)

A gallery of images showcasing Populi’s Mobile Researcher product in action, on mobile phones and computer interfaces:

Question: What about pricing? How do you charge for Mobile Researcher?
As we roll out additional products on the platform (Populi), we hope to develop a multitude of billing models (including free models whereby revenue could be generated through advertising, opt-in marketing, permission-based data mining or context-sensitive search for example). We’d obviously need to drive volumes for that to work effectively.

For the current Mobile Researcher product which focuses on organisations who deploy fieldworkers to conduct research, we have implemented a transactional billing model whereby the organisation conducting the research purchases credit allowing them to process responses. We took this decision for several reasons:

• The prepaid credit model has worked exceptionally well in Africa so far (e.g. airtime).
• The cost of submitting responses is borne predominantly by the organisation receiving the data (not by the respondent although there are tiny airtime charges for data), thus centralising costs.
• The barrier to entry and risk is very low as we don’t require organisations to buy expensive licenses or software. They purchase credit (even a few hundred dollars worth to start) and don’t need to commit to anything.
• Transactional billing is fair since the organisation is only billed for the service when it is used.
• Many organisations are looking for a hosted solution as they do not wish to or cannot support the hardware and personnel required to manage their own systems.

When an organisation signs up, a ‘Research Console’ (essentially a web portal) is created for them which centralises research-related activity (such as survey design, data export, reporting and fieldworker management). From here they may design surveys which consist of fields (questions) which need to be answered and logic which links them together (such as ‘If response = yes, skip to Q11′).

Surveys are then deployed to fieldworkers who conduct the them on their phones using a mobile application, WAP, Web or SMS (each ‘channel’ has its advantages and limitations). When a completed survey is uploaded from a fieldworker’s phone, the system calculates an amount to deduct from the available prepaid credit for the corresponding organisation based on the number of fields actually submitted in that response.

The baseline cost is approximately $0.01 per field (we work in South African Rands so it’s exchange rate specific). Thus, if 10 questions were posed, the total cost per response would be approx $0.10. If, for some reason, such as skip logic, only 5 questions were posed in the survey, an amount of approx $0.05 would be deducted. Airtime costs (rendered by the relevant network operators) are dependent on the package the fieldworker is on, but even in worst case scenarios are usually in the order of fractions of a cent per survey.

We also negotiate volume discounts in cases where an organisation wishes to purchase a large amount of credit.

Question: Why does Mobile Researcher matter in the African context?
Our goals for Mobile Researcher are to improve the quality, quantity and speed of data being collected. Bad decisions, policy and life choices are the result of poor quality, insufficient or outdated information. In Africa, where these problems are all-too-common, the prevalence of the mobile phone in the absence of other technologies makes it an excellent tool to help improve the situation. Traditionally, paper-based data collection techniques have been expensive, difficult to manage and have taken so long to be processed that the data may be may no longer be accurate or relevant.

To highlight the benefits, Health Systems Trust (an NGO in South Africa I have close ties with) is currently evaluating rural clinics using Mobile Researcher where there aren’t even computers in some cases. They receive the information back in near real-time as opposed to months later and it is stored securely and without the need for additional data capture. The possibility of building a near real-time Health Information System based on Mobile Researcher is a very real one. This could allow outbreaks to be rapidly identified, patients to be more effectively treated and monitored, and so on. As with any new technology however, it takes some time to educate and convince the naysayers.

Question: Who are the competitors and what are their advantages/disadvantages?
There are of course many companies who offer PDA solutions but we believe one of the core differentiators of our solution is that it leverages low cost and existing mobile phones and the internet.

Two companies offering similar solutions in the UK who we’ve found on the internet but haven’t had direct contact with are listed below. There are others but to limit the brevity of this email, I’ve kept to these two.

• Embrace Mobile (www.embracemobile.com)
• Bluetrail (www.bluetrail.co.uk)

Of course we’d like to believe that technically our solution is better (but that is up to the public to decide!). We have extensive experience in both mobile and web development and believe that the simplicity and usability of our solution underpins its elegance.

Africa’s unusual technology profile makes it the ideal place to build and market mobile-driven service delivery and information exchange mechanisms. While sending out fieldworkers to conduct research is critical (particularly in Africa where monitoring and evaluation of intervention efforts is so important), the real power will come when the end user is empowered to retrieve and feedback information. We are working hard to make this a reality. We have direct access to these markets (we’ve been focusing closest to home to start of course). Even in South Africa, there are enormous challenges of poverty and lack of physical infrastructure. But mobile phones can help overcome these challenges - a platform to leverage them is what is missing. I recently read your paper on The Africa Network in which you make similar observations.

In addition to our geographic positioning, we also believe that our high level vision will differentiate us. As I mentioned, eventually we’d like to see the end user being able to submit and request information with almost an unlimited number of interactions (for research purposes but also for a variety of other things such as trade, incident reporting, health information, remote diagnoses, etc.). Most of our competitors’ visions end at research.

We already have good connections with some of the biggest research organisations in South Africa (specifically in the health sector), such as the Medical Research Council of South Africa (www.mrc.ac.za), Health Systems Trust (www.hst.org.za), Human Sciences Research Council (www.hsrc.ac.za), University of KwaZulu-Natal (www.ukzn.ac.za), University of Cape Town (www.uct.ac.za), University of Witswatersrand (www.wits.ac.za), Statistics South Africa (www.statssa.gov.za), and others. It will take time for this technology (or rather the use of it in this way) to become mainstream. It will also take money and high level talks with network operators and manufacturers to be widely successful. It is our belief that we need to build a strong business first to be able to spearhead this.

Another South African NGO called Cell-Life (www.cell-life.org.za) has been working on an Open Source mobile data capture project. I have met with them before and will be meeting with them again this week at their request to discuss areas for collaboration. Of course our strategies are different: they are funded by donations where we are trying to build a sustainable business model but our intentions are similar.

As I was looking into the landscape that is online stocks and markets in Africa for a post I did recently about African stock market opportunities online, I looked long and hard at StocksKenya. It was particularly intriguing to me because they’ve taken a very hyper-local approach to information on the stock market in Kenya. They’re building a strong and focused community, and they have a real chance to grow this into a money-making business.

Josiah Mugambi, one of the three minds behind the site and someone that I’ve had the chance to meet a couple times in Nairobi, graciously did an email interview with me.

What is the basic background behind StocksKenya?
We came up with the idea behind stockskenya.com early last year (Feb 2006). We got tired of perusing through papers for daily updates on the stock exchange and the task of analyzing trends was not easy since this required manual entry of daily prices into a spreadsheet. We also had in mind a personal finance manager online that we would individually use to track our finances and portfolios.

So we registered stockskenya.com and slowly began development. Between the three of us; Edwin doing most of the development work and Ted and I doing research and data collection as well as testing, we had the makings of a prototype by May 2006. We were doing these in our spare time (roughly 5-10 hrs a week in total). A friend of ours who also runs a stocks agency was also encouraging us to develop a portfolio manager that would enable agents of stock brokers on the Nairobi Stock Exchange to service their clients more efficiently through the internet.

What kind of user and traffic information can you share with us?
By Aug 2006 the first version of the site was complete. We began to tell our friends about it, mainly to enable us to weed out bugs and to improve it. It was not until late Sept 2006 that traffic began to increase significantly after the site was featured in a local daily. The discussion forum has been very active too. The growth in terms of contributors has been gradual especially after Sept-Oct 2006. We have not actually done any marketing campaign but have quite a reasonable amount of traffic for a site in Kenya. We have about 4000 registered users on the site with the number growing. We also receive about 60,000 visits on a monthly basis.

Have you realized any profit from this venture, how about the return on investment of time spent?
As a business, the site does sustain itself, and provides some return on our investment, though we believe that its greater potential is still unrealized. In terms of input, majority of the resources have come from the three of us - the technical and limited financial input that has been done.

What’s in the future for you and the others at StocksKenya?
We are also intending to provide a platform similar to stockskenya for the East African region as the regions stock exchanges develop.

Ken Banks is the 6th in the African Digerati series of interviews. Ken has become a recognized leader in the mobile space in Africa, primarily through his open source text messaging hub called FrontlineSMS. He speaks regularly around the world on the use of mobile technologies to meet the demands of the real world in places like Africa.

Blog and/or website:
You can find more information on Ken Banks at www.kiwanja.net. Including information on his projects, his mobile database, pictures and blog. It’s one of the best resources for information on mobile technology for Africa on the web.

What do you do?
I use a mix of 22 years in IT, 14 years working on and off in various parts of Africa, and a degree in Social Anthropology with Development Studies to help local, national and international non-profit organisations make better use of information and communications technology – particularly mobile – in their work. I’m usually based out of the UK (where I have a small flat in a lovely Cambridgeshire village), but am currently a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University on the Reuters Digital Vision Program. To pay the bills I do a mixture of paid consultancy and pro-bono work for a range of NGOs, working mostly at grassroots level, a place where I strongly believe the greatest change will come

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I had a chance to chat with Nick Wadhams, a freelance journalist living in Nairobi, when I was there last month. He had wanted to discuss tech issues in Africa, especially the gaming world. Maybe it was because of our joint love of computer games, or because he’s a natural conversationalist, but we hit it off all the same.

Since I had done a piece on a Wesley Kirinya, a Kenyan game maker, he had tracked me down. We talked about the future of game designers in Africa. His piece is now published, titled “A ‘Lonely’ Inventor Creates a Computer Game in Africa”:

By Western computer game standards, Kirinya’s effort is awkward and slow; there is no music, no storyline and no character development. But the game is unique because Kirinya created the engine that powers the software’s code, rather than downloading one of the many serviceable engines available on the Internet. The only element that he farmed out was some of the graphic design to a Czech programmer for $600.

(Read the whole story)

Besides WhiteAfrican.com, I also write two other African technology-related blogs. AfriGadget is a team blog, dedicated to showcasing African ingenuity. African Signals is a multimedia outlet for interviews, videos and podcasts on news and news makers in Africa.

African Signals
The last week few weeks have been very interesting for me, primarily because I’ve had the chance to do a number of Skype interviews with entrepreneurs and technologists around Africa. I’ve found that video and audio editing is time consuming, but the experience has proved to be extremely rewarding. I’d like to start adding a weekly news overview, so look for that soon.

Besides interviews, I’m starting to push more of African multimedia content towards African Signals. With my upcoming trip to South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania look for more interviews and reports from those countries soon.

Recent posts:

How Big is South Africa’s Informal Sector? (Video)

Refurbished Computers for Schools in Kenya (Video)

AfriGadget
AfriGadget keeps on rolling. Interestingly enough, even though we’re always scrambling for new stories and it gets update irregularly, AfriGadget has the most pickups by major news outlets out of all the blogs that I write. More than 500 people pull the blog feed, and it has shown up on very large sites ranging from MAKE:magazine to BoingBoing to Wired.

Recent posts:

Solar Power in Madagascar (Video)

Creating Windmills from Old Bicycle Parts and Roofing Materials

African Children’s Toys: Ingenuity Starts at a Young Age

Summary
I want to thank everyone who links to, comments and contributes to all of these web sites. If you see a great example of African ingenuity, have news to share, or come across someone that should be interviewed, send me an email through my contact form.

Only true journalists are worth reading, or so we’re told…
Like a lot of the South African blogosphere, I’m a little stunned by the arrogance and sarcasm coming from Sunday Times columnist David Bullard. He writes an essay where bloggers are considered the sociopathic “air guitarists” of media. Vincent Maher goes on the offensive against Bullard and sums up some great points on why his essay is so myopic.

African Signals has been picking up:
Here are two of the recent interviews on African Signals. If I thought I knew a lot about what was going on in the industry in Africa, I’m getting an education on the real scope of change that is happening throughout the continent. Now, more than ever, I know that the tech revolution in Africa has begun.

Interviewing the Maker of the Nigerian SMS Election Monitoring System - Ken Banks

A Talk with Eric Osiakwan of AfrISPA

A Paul Graham Essay
Paul Graham generally has incredibly well written essays. This one is no different. In it he compares unions to startups.

An Alternative Theory of Unions - Paul Graham

Today I’d like to announce a new technology news site for Africa, called African Signals (www.africansignals.com). It’s a place where I will be interviewing technologists around the world who are doing work in and for Africa. You’ll also see walkthroughs of new products and hear of upcoming events.

This first episode is where I stumble all over myself trying to do a simple African Signals intro (video) and also an interview with Mike Stopforth (audio) from Afrigator.com.

If you know someone to interview or would like to be interviewed, want to let people know of upcoming events, or any other news - let me know via the African Signals contact form.

I’ve learned a couple important facts about myself in the process of putting together African Signals. First, it needs to be about the people I’m interviewing and the products, not me - since I don’t have that compelling of an on-air presence. Second, doing video is a pain in the rear, but that it’s good to stretch myself into unfamiliar areas.

I need to give a big thanks to Jason Hawkins for putting together the intro sequence and doing the first video shoot. He’s an amazing video and tech guy, that I highly recommend to everyone. He’s also a CSS and XHTML wizard for anyone interested in having a website created. I can’t promise that all the video will be of this quality, especially while I’m on the road.

[Fair warning: this is my first time doing anything like this and it will probably be a little rough in the beginning...]

Last week I had a chance to sit down and have a conference call (Skype chat) with the technology brains behind the latest buzz in the African blogosphere: The Aggregators.

Justin Hartman (Afrigator), Vincent Maher (Amatomu), Neville Newey (Muti) and Matthew Buckland (Amatomu) got together for a half hour to discuss their creations. Having that much brain power pointed in my direction left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, but they were all nice enough chaps and didn’t make me feel like a complete tech-peasant, for which I thank them.

Bullet-point takeaways:

• Neville points out that Muti is actually not an aggregator (I apologize)
• Amatomu is positioning itself for the greater non-blogging readership, not just the bloggers
• Afrigator has a plan to grow through a mobile phone strategy
• Justin coins the term “Afrosphere” to describe the African blogosphere
• There is a need to be wary of South African domination of platforms
• Amatomu plans to grow outside of South Africa regionally
• Everyone aggrees that broadband connectivity is hugely important for future growth

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Ethan Zuckerman is the 5th in the African Digerati series of interviews. Honestly, I’m amazed with what Ethan has done with technology and what he continues to do - so much of which directly benefits Africans. His line-up of web projects is simply amazing. What isn’t mentioned here is that he founded Geekcorps, a non-profit technology volunteer corps, that creates real tangible technology change on the African continent. He’s also on my “required reading” list of African bloggers.

Blog and/or website:
Theere’s a few of them. My personal blog is “My Heart’s in Accra”. I’m deeply involved with BlogAfrica and Global Voices, and I’m the chairman of the non-profit that runs Worldchanging.com.

What do you do:
Heh. I take great pride in the fact that I’ve never had a job… which is to say, I try to work on projects that are so much fun to work on that they don’t feel like work. These days, I work on a wide range of projects that focus on technology in developing nations, and my compensation is sometimes monetary, sometimes less tangible. Over a dozen years ago, I would have told you I was a “software architect” – I helped build Tripod.com, one of the first webhosting sites. Nowadays, my job title at Global Voices is “co-founder and big geek”, and my responsibilities include management, fundraising and oversight of our technical architecture.

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Recently I wrote an article on DrumNet, which is a mobile based information exchange for farmers in rural Kenya, who’s banking partner is Equity Bank. Yesterday at the Kenyan Investment Conference I was able to track down and spend some time with the president of Equity Bank, James Mwangi, and Allan Waitata, to discuss some of their background and their future as it relates to technology.

Interestingly enough, Equity Bank built itself up as the “common Kenyan’s” bank by going after the rural customer with only a small amount of income. They have built this business up over the years until it has displaced the other more established banks in Kenya - they now hold the largest market share of people at 1.2 million (33%). [You can read more about the history and mission of Equity Bank, read African Path's interview with James Mwangi.]

So, here is a bank who is building into the long tail - that great theory that made Google the giant on the internet, which has fueled Wal-Mart’s growth, and that is making billions of dollars at Apple with iTunes. The basic tenant is that Equity Bank is reaching more people and making less margin per transaction, but because they’re making so many transactions they are very very successful.

Here’s a graph to illustrate the banking industry in Kenya:

As can be seen, there is a great deal of business to be had by reaching this under served demographic. However, to reach that demographic takes a good deal of work, a proper word-of-mouth marketing campaign, and a solid service offering worth talking about. Judging by the lines at the Equity Bank sign-up tables here in Atlanta, they’re doing all three things very well.

Rafiq Phillips is 4th in the African Digerati series of interviews. He is a South African who is heavily invested in development on the web and mobile devices. His application, iDrive, a source for driving school instructors has been made available on both web and mobile platforms. Rafiq is also very active within the African blogosphere through the Web AddiCT’s blog.

Like the others who have been interviewed so far, Rafiq is actively taking part in the discussions that will move Africa ahead using technology, and is also doing it.
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“M” is the third in the African Digerati series of interviews. His cryptographic alias is part of the brand that he has built within the Kenyan Blogosphere around his blog Thinker’s Room. If popularity of a blog is shown by the number of commenters on any one blog post, then it can be argued that Thinker’s Room is at the top of the list.

One of the projects that M has worked on, which is not mentioned in this interview, is Mzalendo, a website whose mission is to keep “an eye on Kenyan Parliament”. They do this by showing profiles of politicians, voting records and providing news and transparency in an historically opaque arena. It’s this ground breaking website, along with his community on Thinker’s Room that makes him a force in digital Africa.
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Last week South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper went mobile (actually, they had a closed subscription-based service prior, but this is open to everyone). You can find the mobile version at http://wap.mg.co.za. What was particularly interesting about this was how simple of an interface they came up with, which made it possible to develop in a day and test for one week (that’s insanely fast by the way!).

I had a chance to catch up with Vincent Maher, their online strategist, to ask a few questions. I asked what technologies they had used, and why they had decided to go with them. It turns out that they used all open source platforms and that they are very much committed to web standards in implementation. Of all the things that Vincent said, the next quote is the most telling to me:
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