gmeltdown

Growing list of entrepreneurship competitions as Startup Weekend comes to Nairobi

2012-02-22T05:36:00.000+03:00

In the last year or so Nairobi has been treated to a multiplicity of competitions and contest organised to promote local technology entrepreneurship. Depending on whether the chicken or the egg came first, one would argue that this has contributed to significant buzz and interest around East Africa’s growing tech start-up culture.

That the region is experiencing growth in the tech start-up scene is difficult to dispute. Doubting people only need to consider the tech scene’s coverage from global media houses such as The Next Web ( Mnachi Mdema’s article and Francis Pisani’s artice), the ReadWriteWeb (Curt Hopkins article), BBC (Egon Cossou’s article), Forbes.com and CNN (Dayo Olopade’s article) - to name a few.

Some of the entrepreneur competitions in the last one year that I can barely recall are IPO48, Garage48, App Circus, Huawei developer challenge. Some of the contests take a more global scope such as Nokia’s Create for millions Contest, infoDev’s Top 50 competition,Google Android Sub Sahara contest, and Apps4Africa. Other global challenges that are still ongoing include Samsung’s Bada Developer Challenge,the Ericsson Applications Award and infoDev’s m2work Micro-work Challenge.

The list of competitions for 2011 above is almost endless. It is however incomplete without mentioning Pivot 25, the predecessor of Pivot East. Being East Africa’s premier mobile apps competition culminating in a pitching conference in June, Pivot East is to many perceived the grand showcase of mobile entrepreneurship in East Africa.

I have come across arguments in the local tech scene that developers and aspiring entrepreneurs have began to suffer from “competition fatigue” so we should “slow down” on them. I argue that we are not yet having too many competitions and that in fact we cannot possibly have enough contests of this kind in East Africa. This in my view will continue to be for as long as we have not as a society fully embraced the start-up culture. More so we should hold as many such competitions as possible for as long as our upcoming tech entrepreneurs have gaps in access to capital, markets, coaching, mentorship and other related entrepreneurship facilitation.

This weekend of 24th-26th February 2012 comes along with at least one more competition in Nairobi - Startup Weekend. The event will be hosted by Nailab at Bishop Magua Center which is gradually becoming Nairobi’s tech startup building. The competition organization in different locations globally borrows from a common format overseen and supported by Startup Weekend, a 501c(3) Non-Profit organization in the San Francisco - United States. It is designed to be a “54-hour event where developers, designers , marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products and launch startups”. The format is very much like Garage48 and IPO48 and goes as follows :-

On Friday Evening attendees present their best ideas in open mic pitching sessions.
Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product.
On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts.

In this weekend’s edition of the event in Nairobi, attendants buy tickets at a fee of Kshs 2,050 payable through M-PESA business number 111666 (received by Growth Africa Limited). Delegates attending the event finale on 26th February only, will pay an entrance fee of KES 500. More information on tickets can be found on the event website http://nairobi.startupweekend.org/tickets/

The organizers have stated in their website engagement of re-known personalites in the industry for speakers, judges and mentors. These according to the organizers include Virtual City’s John Waibochi, ICT board’s Paul Kukubo, Paul Mwachi of Isys Software, Capital FM’s Chris Kirubi, inMobi’s Moses Kemibaro, and Craft Silicon’s Kamal Buthabati. Judging from the results of other weekend long contests held in Nairobi where teams of entrepreneurs accessed prize money, entrepreneurship capacity building, early stage investment and access to valuable networks, I would encourage many upcoming entrepreneurs to take part in this event.

Many more start-ups participating in contests such as Startup Weekend can only make East Africa grow its knowledge economy through entrepreneurship. When more of the upcoming entrepreneurs are empowered with skills, exposure and funding, one can only bet on East Africa being able to showcase great progress in the region’s mobile entrepreneurship. The region’s Pivot East Pitching Conference and other entrepreneur showcase avenues may therefore brace themselves for bigger challenges in selecting the best of the best.

Gearing up for Mobile Web East Africa 2012

2012-02-20T04:13:00.000+03:00

East Africa region continues to strengthen its profile as a mobile innovation hub. As mobile developers, entrepreneurs and stakeholders prepare for Pivot East, the regions mobile apps pitching conference in June, a couple of industry related events are happening as well. These events are helping to showcase East Africa as a mobile innovation destination.

This week on 22nd and 23rd February, Nairobi gets to host one of East Africa’s conferences on the mobile web ecosystem. The conference was first held in Nairobi on 3rd and 4th February 2010 and comes back to the City two years later. Much has changed in the last two years and the conference is an opportunity for many to catch up with the state of affairs since mobile phone penetration and mobile data connectivity began to increase exponentially in the region. The conference will be at the Southern Sun Mayfair and Kenya ICT board are its official hosts.

*iHub_ and m:lab East Africa are officially supporting the event. A 30% discount is granted for iHub members attending the conference for which registration can be made online here. The event organizers also are offering 50% subsidies on delegate fees to developers and start up companies under 2 years old and less than 10 employees. The event promises to be interactive and full of insights for developers, entrepreneurs and professionals playing in the mobile web sector. With a compelling agenda, the list of speakers and the discussion panelists, delegates are likely to appreciate better the state of affairs in the region’s mobile web ecosystem.

The conference starts with Kenya’s ICT Board CEO Paul Kukubo Reviewing the evolution of the Kenyan sector from 2010 to 2012. The CEO is expected to highlight successess and challenges around, Local content, app monetisation, startup/SME financing, and innovation hubs. Kenya’s Permanent Sectretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication is expected on the same day to speak about the government dedication and support to the ICT sector. The conference is also expected to here from Research In Motion’s Technical Partnership Manager for Sub Saharan Africa - Michael Weitzel.

Mark Kaigwa, a partner at Afr-innovator, an African technology news portal will also be there to examine the “Silicon Savanah” tag and whether it carries much substance beyond the increased marketing efforts by the Government. Other presentation and discussion themes for the first day include mobile marketing and the opportunity for app monetization and growth of brands. Frank Maina of Sponge East Africa and inMobi’s Moses Kemibaro will be speakers in this session. Entertainment and media consumption on mobile devices will be another area of discussion with Johan Nel, Chief Executive Officer & Founder, Umuntu Media speaking. Emma Kaye, Chief Executive Officer of Bozza will talk about the prospects of growth in mobile film making.

The second day commences with Strathmore University’s Joseph Sevilla exploring the trend of tech focused youth that might drive the next generation of mobile content, services and companies. Judith Owigar of AkiraChix will also speak on efforts to enhance uptake of tech-entrepreneurship by women. John Carroll, Director of Technology at ForgetMeNot Software will speak on what it takes to to cultivate a startup culture. Other presentation and discussion themes lined up for the second day include using mobile as a tool for empowerment and social good.

The second and final day will culminate in an app developer competition where 5 entrants will battle it out for $1500 worth of InMobi ad network spend and blackberry handsets among other prizes and benefits. The competitors will have five minutes to pitch.

The conference will end with an open mic session where any member of the delegation can take the podium present and discuss whatever they like in 5 minutes. Each open-mic presentation will be followed by 5 minutes of questions and answers with the audience.

A full programme for the two day conference can be viewed in the conference’s website (www.mobileeastafrica.com).

Key Points in Kenya’s new e-Health Strategy

2011-08-29T11:23:00.000+03:00

During the month of August 2011, one of the many developments in the national Health and ICT scene was the launch of Kenya's National e-Health Strategy 2011-2017. The vision of the strategy is “To develop efficient, accessible, equitable, secure and consumer friendly health care services enabled by ICT”. The strategy also outlines a mission to “promote and deliver efficient healthcare services to Kenyans and consumers beyond our borders, using ICT”.

Hon. Peter Anyang Ngong'o – Kenya's Minister for Medical Services officially launched the strategy on 11th August 2011.

Hon. Peter Anyang' Nyongo - Kenya's Minister for Medical Services

Calling for a paradigm shift

The newly launched strategy seeks to set in motion a process of compensating for the shortage of skilled health care professionals by harnessing ICT for improved healthcare delivery. It also aims to tap into the latent capacity of healthcare consumers to play an active role in the protection and management of their personal health. The strategy also leverages the imperative for the government to provide quality healthcare for all its citizens to build a nation with increased economic and social productivity.

These underlying themes constitute a requisite mindset to begin addressing the failures of the country's National Health Sector Strategic Plan - NHSSP I (1999 – 2004) and NHSSP II (2005 – 2010).

The Real Challenges

Challenges of the health care sector in Kenya are highlighted for attention in the strategy are

A shortage of healthcare professionals
Emerging threats to public heath such as H1N1 ad H5N1 flu
Expectation of equality in service deliver among rural and urban populations
Silos of care resulting in duplication and difficulties for national health management information systems
Inadequate health infrastructure and equipment

Strategic areas of intervention

To address the above challenges the strategy isolates five key areas of intervention forming a five pillar conceptual framework approach as follows:

Telemedicine
Health Information Systems
Information for citizens
mHealth
eLearning

Although the document does not take time to elaborate specific roles and expectations for these pillars in the conceptual framework, the strategy acknowledges that the pillar will include technology service overlaps and that interventions might cut across pillars.

Implementation

Stakeholders involved in development of the strategy prioritised the Health Information Systems Pillar for implementation. Indeed this is a clever move because it targets to build on progress made by the Ministry of Health’s division of health information systems to access some low hanging fruits. Arguably it appears to be a politically clever move to focus the Division of eHealth and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and the Division of Health Information systems on the same objectives.

The Health Information Systems pillar was further subdivided for implementation in the strategy into various functional domains as follows :-

Patient Centric Information
Pharmacy and Medical Supply Chain Information System
Financial Information, including insurance and payments
Health Workforce Management and Training
Regulation

Curiously, this subdivision of functional domains seems to relegate health management information systems (HMIS) in which significant progress has been achieved with the ongoing national roll-out of DHIS2 (username and password available from HIS division).

One more notable inclusion in the strategy is a phase to design the Enterprise Architecture for e-Health Strategy implementation. Depending on how well this is done, persistent concerns among stakeholders such as effort replication, implementation silos and unproductive undercurrents on tools selection should be a thing of the past.

The strategy was developed by the Ministry of Medical services in conjunction with the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation and with the support of the World Bank Country Office. There also seems to have been a fair attempt to make the strategy development participatory. This was championed by Dr. Esther Ogara, Head of the eHealth and CPD division. Listed contributors to the strategy included physicians, pharmacists, ICT experts, supply chain experts, economists and development workers.

Of Mobile Money Reliability and a Case for Multi-SIM phones

2011-07-18T22:34:00.003+03:00

Mobile Money in Kenya, and East Africa in general has become part and parcel of everyday activities. Often times users of M-Pesa in Kenya are seen complaining about how their mobile money payments (or transfers) did not go through in good time to much their hurry. Sometimes users complain about a complete failure of their attempted transactions. One would think then, "if M-PESA is that unreliable, why not Use alternative mobile money transfer platforms?" The reality is that the alternatives - the likes of Airtel Money, Yucash, Orange Money and Mobikash may not always be better. For instance, the alternatives might imply one driving for a long while looking for an agent to deposit money for the transaction as their agent networks are largely under-developed.

Critical minutes of need

At a critical moment this evening, I run out of power in my house (still learning to match KPLC pre-payments and usage). So having got used to the convenience of recharging the pre-paid meter account using M-PESA, I reached out for my phone telling people around that I would get power back in just a few minutes. I went ahead and used M-PESA's pay bill option for some units of power (business number 888880). After twenty minutes in darkness and not having received a recharge token, I began ranting about unreliable M-PESA and slow delivery of SMS messages by Safaricom.

Emergency funds on Airtel Money

In the moment of impatience and grit (in darkness of course), I remembered I had recently loaded my Airtel Money account with some emergency funds. Emergency it was, so I checked my Airtel Sim card option and used Airtel Money’s relatively simpler pay-bill service to order some units of power for the same KPLC meter. After about 1 minute, interestingly, I got SMS notifications on both Airtel and Safaricom Sim cards of the requested recharge tokens.

Simplistic conclusion

I waited 21 minutes to receive prepaid KPLC power units from Safaricom’s M-Pesa and 1 minute to receive the same from Airtel Money. There is probably an easy conclusion on the relative speeds of these two mobile money platforms. Those with more scientific minds might however wish for more “sample readings” for the same experiment. Regardless of the ultimate conclusion for such a rigorous approach, it is obvious that the speed of transactions is not the only factor for the choice of a mobile money platform.

While M-PESA may have an impressive national spread of agents in Kenya, the service is often down for various reasons (including congestion). Orange Money, Airtel Money and others may be feature rich and perform better on transaction speeds. They may even boast of better international agent networks. However their local agent networks often fail would-be customers miserably.

Indeed there are ideal situations for instance where one has easy access to Airtel’s customer care center for money top up and Pesanet ATMs for withdrawals. In that case one might not really feel the pinch of a poor agent network. That would be more so if all they do is use pay pill options for utility payments and other integrated remittances. In that case the receiving party as well is not directly affected by the agent network’s extensiveness.

Enjoy from all sides

With mobile number portability efforts having failed to fulfill much of their promise, people may wish to try a time tested approach - getting the best from all sides. By keeping multiple SIMs - active or inactive, one can subscribe to services from all mobile network operators and enjoy the benefits from all directions. They can then invoke the service from the most ideal mobile carrier in their immediate context. With my little KPLC pay bill experiment (or accident) above am thinking I shall continue keeping at least 2 mobile money services with some emergency money for such situations. When more people begin to get smart in this suggested way, then multi-SIM devices become a necessity. The argument can be extended with much ease for voice and data services where pricing and service quality can vary significant across mobile carriers, taking into account usage at different times and geographical spaces.

Of Samsung (Wyre’s) Duos and others

Incidentally Samsung seem to have discovered the promise of Dual SIM markets in emerging economies well before other manufacturers. Samsung dual sim phones are the only ones that have worked for me over time (4 years now). Of late I have been trying Samsung’s Duos (C3222?) and I think it is as convincing as its predecessors in handling dual SIM cards. Sadly no manufacturer yet has dual SIM smart phone yet (forget the Chinese counterfeits).

In summary, multi SIM mobile phones increasingly have a way of saving consumers from unhealthy emotional attachment to their mobile networks. Gladly I think I recently convinced a friend - @techweez to take this trend seriously. It is perhaps by recognizing the need for such mobile phones that manufacturers might endear themselves better to the peculiar consumer market in East Africa.

Child Count for A growing mHealth scene in Kenya

2011-04-18T02:09:00.005+03:00

As the pivot25 competition progresses, I have been getting curious over the nature of applications coming up in the category for mHealth. I thought to myself that perhaps an analysis of locally existing albeit underutilised mHealth applications will help to manage my curiosity.

Useful perspective

For some reason a lot of my last 8 years was spent working on information systems to improve community based health services. It is a shame that I did not get myself interested enough in SMS based data collection platforms for health service delivery until recently. Earlier in the year, while reading through @mberg's blog post I was even surprised by a prediction to see a lot less discussion about the differences in particular platforms (CommCare, ChildCount+, FrontlineSMS:Medic, Mwana, MoTeCH). I could be excused for my apparently slow uptake of these tools because the Kenyan Health IT scene to which I vainly contributed has over the years been mark-timing. The apparent stalling of Health IT in Kenya seems to be caused by a 7+ year old inconclusive debate of which tools are best for electronic medical records (EMR) systems.

First encounter

Great initiatives like ChildCount have a way of eventually popping up the stack despite being implemented with muted marketing effort. I first heard about ChildCount in one of the annual OpenMRS meetings. I was not only impressed that ChildCount seamlessly integrates with OpenMRS for its master database. The SMS based platform impressed me further with its easy application in Kenya’s remote areas empowering communities to improve child survival and maternal health.

How it works

ChildCount uses uses SMS text messages to facilitate and coordinate the activities of community health care workers (CHWs). CHWs are community based health care providers. Any standard phone can be used by CHWs to register patients and report their health status to a central web dashboard for as long as there is a slight mobile carrier signal. The system supports messaging features for communication between members of the health service provision system alongside an automated alert system which all combine to reduce gaps in treatment for local communities. By providing a central web dashboard with information based on the processed SMS messages, ChildCount also provides a real-time view of health of in a community.

The new improved ChildCount+ works slightly differently from the initial deployment but the overall approach remains fundamentally the same.

A combination of noble efforts

The ChildCount platform is developed by the Earth Institute in collaboration with the UNICEF Innovation Team for the Millennium Villages Project. ChildCount is now free and open-source software available under the GPL License. It is build on yet another open source framework - RapidSMS. An important provision of phone handsets for CHWs to initially launch the service was facilitated by Sony Ericsson in early 2009. Airtel Kenya, then known as Zain also assisted in setting up a toll free number for the project . The project has also benefited from having in its team Matt Berg, as its Technology Director. Matt was in the 2010 list of Time’s top 100 influential people of the world

Deployments

Like many other open-source platforms, it is difficult to know how many installations of ChildCount exist across the globe. For sure though, after interacting with some good people at the millenium villages project like Maurice Baraza, I know that ChildCount is instrumental to their exemplary service delivery at their project in Sauri in Kenya’s Siaya County. At Sauri, the project covers over 65,000 people with child and maternal health care services. They have also deployed the system at the Dertu millenium village project in Kenya’s Garissa County.

In the larger East Africa, ChildCount is deployed in at least one millennium village in Tanzania. In regional health informatics circles, word has it that the Rwanda government is considering a national deployment of ChildCount to support its community based health service delivery system. This does not come in as a surprise as the Rwanda government has recently been a regional leader in taking up ICT to improve its service delivery with more action than speak.

Less speak for more action

More information on ChildCount can be found on the project’s website. This pdf report might be useful for those wishing to dig deeper into the rationale behind the project and its initial success as a pilot. It should interest local mobile application developers and mHealth enthusiasts to consider building on ChildCount’s successes as they seek to further innovate mobile solutions in health services. RapidAndroid is definitely a natural platform to look at in keeping this innovation wheel spinning. We can only hope that pivot25, the Android Developer Challenge and other developer competitions will spur innovation in this direction. I shall leave readers with a video of the health care service delivery works going on at Sauri Millenium Village that I found useful

Nairobi's Tech Scene - Personal Highlights for Quarter 1 of 2011

2011-04-11T03:10:00.002+03:00

My last article in this blog was posted in December 2010. That makes almost 5 months since I made a serious post. It was by no means intentionally staying away from writing for this long. It was rather more of 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak'. To kick start blogging again I shall lazily try to recap the noteworthy developments I have observed in my small technology world during the first three months of 2011.

Mobile Monday with Pesapal - January 17
That was an inspiring moment especially listening to Agosta Liko of PesaPal. It was impressive to see a local technology startup begin to penetrate the corporate market place - with schools and banks. I still have not heard much from them regarding one of my wish list items though. They should think more through the possibilities for Kenyans paying monthly rent using PesaPal - their great payment information service. Liko's powerpoint presentation can be downloaded here.

OpenMRS meetup - January 24
Despite the rainy morning, we had a great meetup with OpenMRS friends at the iHub that was ably organized by my friend @JWesonga. On the same day there was an opportunity to engage students at the university of Nairobi's School of Computing and Informatics which I had helped organise. It was lovely then to listen in to @pbiondich and @ekrub as they sensitized the local computer science students who were mostly in second year on software development for good.

Fireside Chat with Ken Oyolla - January 27th

I had this great opportunity to listen to Ken Oyola - Nokia's General Manager for East and Southern Africa during the iHub's monthly Fire Side chat. I had first met Oyolla when I was a form one in Mangu high school - he had 'cleared' from the great institution and was coming back as a mentor a year after. During the FireSide chat, it struck me how people do not change even after a decade or more of exposure to the world out there. Ken was still the same candidly inspiring strong personality. Am sure he will achieve another 'first one', beyond being the first African to hold such a high ranking position in Nokia.

Mid-Feb Transitional Period

Mid February was a transitional period for me as I left my fairly comfortable, no-real-pressure state corporation Job. It was time to take up a more challenging role with m:lab EAST AFRICA. The new role is really exciting and much worth the career shift as it fits magically into my ICT4D leadership aspirations. More so, it seems like the best opportunity to amplify my modest contribution to East Africa's knowledge economy.

Mobile Monday with Microsoft Guys - 21st February

In all honesty I do not have a history of being a fan of Microsoft's products. Having to say something about m:lab at the event, attending this Mobile Monday was mostly a duty call. I was impressed to see how Microsoft has been working hard to contribute towards positive social transformation across the world. They had a video of previous Imagine Cup winners from somewhere in Asia which was impressive. It was also my first event to hear about Craft Silicon's ELMA platform for rapid mobile application development of mobile banking solutions. The thought of having a mobile applications generator, for development without much coding sounded interesting - only I thought it will remove control and gratification from the local application developer.

It is a shame I missed February's Fire Side Chat with Larry Wall (on 24th February). Larry Wall is the creator of the Pearl Programming Language for readers who would care to know.

iHub one year anniversary - 11th March

In the dying hours of the year 2010, I was reflecting and thinking to myself that inception of the iHub had been the greatest thing that had happened to Kenya's tech scene that year. I really wanted to blog my thoughts then but I realized I needed to avoid looking to oversell my hurriedly done late application for green membership. The thought passed by and in March I was happy to participate in iHub's first anniversary. Meeting the bigger iHub community was awesome although I had a rude culture shock of members murmuring away as ICT board's Paul Kukubo gave his speech. With me coming from a government background - it felt awkward. A parastatal CEO like Paul was meant to be revered and accorded maximum attention in public service circles - the murmurs felt radically different. Culture shock and assimilation aside, I look forward to a ground breaking year 2011 for the iHub community in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mobile Monday with Moses Kemibaro of Dealfish - 21st March

This event was a must attend for me - not because of any duty call but because @MosesKemibaro is one of the most respectable bloggers in Nairobi's tech scene for me. I needed to find out what he had been up to after rumor had it that he was no longer actively involved with his DotSavvy company. Moses is Regional Manager for Dealfish. His presentation helped to demistify Dealfish - currently a constant fixture in Nairobis outdoor bill boards and online google ad-words for the Kenya context. With tweets like this :- "RT @mlabeastafrica Dealfish are not sure how to monetize their service yet - they are not worried about this either #momoke", the message was loud and clear that Moses' new venture had deep pockets behind it. Moses fell short of being forthright on the issue of when Dealfish would start making money. His update later that Dealfish would turn on its money making machine at its own chosen time was quite telling on how serious the South African firm was about the Kenyan online market place.

During this Mobile monday it was also enlightening to know of m-order, an upcoming service from Hilda Moraa and her troop who were students at the Strathmore university. Nairobi's chapter of Mobile Monday has some good pictures of the event in their website here

Fireside Chat with John Waibochi of Virtual City 24th March

The iHub did it again with its March fireside chat. Then it was John Waibochi, the CEO of Virtual City on the raised floor. Virtual City is the Kenyan company that won 2010's Nokia innovation challenge with $1 million prize money. Mr. Waibochi's story was intriguing and inspiring as well. With the entrepreneurial tips of 'riding the wave' and exiting just before the wave's peak, Waibochi did well to motivate budding tech-entrepreneurs. His talk was much of a consolation also for me - to know that my corporate, MBAish background had a place in tech-entrepreneurship. It got me dusting down my ERP, ISO 9000 and balanced scored card salesmanship cap with some rather unrealistic ambitions for my new career situation. Waibochi also offered tips on important global trends such as android and impact investment which he thought were more important than looking up to real life mentors.

Anticipation for Second Quarter of 2011

There were many developments and events I missed on in the first quarter of 2011. Indeed Nairobi has a thriving tech scene that no one person can keep track of all happenings. Watching the iHub's event calendar helps a bit though. In the months of April, May and June 2011, there are some important events I look forward to. One of them is iHub's Fireside chat for April which will have Mr. Joe Mucheru of Google Africa on the raised floor on 21st April. I also have much anticipation for this year's Pivot25 event that will see 25 mobile applications being showcased at Nairobi's Ole Sereni Hotel in June 2011.

Sticky thoughts on Safaricom’s Direction with Bob Collymore

2010-12-18T17:12:00.000+03:00

Two week old context

On the Saturday of December 4th 2010, I fought my way out of bed to make it on time for Mindspeak with Robert (Bob) William Collymore. Bob has been Safaricom’s Chief Executive Officer from October 2010 and many Kenyans were curious to hear ‘anything’ from him at the increasingly popular event. Mindspeak is an event organized monthly on Saturday mornings by Mr. Aly Khan Satchu (Chief Executive Officer of Rich.co.ke). The venue for the event is usually at the Nu Metro cinema, Westgate Mall in Nairobi’s Westlands area. The MindSpeak happened only two months after another insightful event I wrote about on ‘Reflections with Michael Joseph of Safaricom’ at the iHub Nairobi. A number of bloggers including James Murua , Tovuti Sanifu and UjenziBora have chronicled their observations at the MindSpeak event with Bob Collymore. A lot of the attendants were also tweeting the event live and their live feed was captured by afrinnovator using CoveritLive.com’s nifty tool. Mr. Aly Khan Satchu has also released a set of videos on the event in his Rich TV series. On this event, although over two weeks have passed and much has been documented, I still have a number of sticky thoughts to share. In this post I wish to hopefully enrich our view of Safaricom from my observations at the MindSpeak.

Excellent Marketing Opportunity

I have previously observed that the stiff competition among our four Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) will be won through presentation of genuine value propositions to the citizenry. Product attributes aside, it is the sheer appearance at MindSpeak by Bob that struck me as Safaricom’s marketing savvy that Yu, Orange, and Airtel Kenya are yet to cath up with. Marketers have this argument that as competition increases it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish a product using traditional attributes such as price, quality and functionality. Perception management then becomes the other strategy to snatch extra points from the competition.

MindSpeak has this niche audience that has significant influence over Kenya’s increasingly important generation of young professionals and students. In the few MindSpeak events I have attended, I could not help but watch the speakers gleefully attempt to persuade the audience about their most intimately held sentiments. The persuasion efforts were all in acknowledgement of the potential influence of the audience particularly through blogs, twitter and social media in general.

Connection with the peculiar Kenyan citizenry

Throughout Bob Collymore’s presentation, it was evident that Safaricom intended to be perceived as a friend of the citizenry. In the presentation, Safaricom was quite ably endearing itself to the audience. Bob was stating Safaricom’s deliberate intentions to drive social and economic change in Kenya. The presentation related very well with Kenya’s dearest development issues including health, education and agriculture. It depicted Safaricom as a development partner and enabler, particularly (and quite strategically so) for rural Kenya.

For our fairly competitive telecom industry, Safaricom’s ability to connect with the citizenry through such a forum, articulating its most carefully packaged industry position was enviable. It is the essence of this deep connection with Kenya’s peculiar environment that Airtel and other competitors of Safaricom do not seem to understand - despite their often superior product offerings.

Arguably, Safaricom’s competitors are too busy packaging counter-offerings, forgetting the need to genuinely connect with their fairly unique operating context. Airtel for instance are still airing global or at most Africanized (one size fits all) advertisements in Kenya. Safaricom on the other hand is spending millions on custom Kenyanized advertisements such as this acclaimed piece. This is why Bob could confidently say that ‘the trust that the public has for safaricom is in itself a great asset’. Whether it is trust or the perceived connection with the citizenry, Safaricom indeed has accumulated for itself a wealth of such invisible assets.

Interests of Major Shareholder(s)

Throughout the presentation and the question/answer sessions, Bob Collymore would suddenly change to a very serious (almost cautious) tone whenever he talked about Safaricom’s shareholders. I found this tweet by Aly Khan Satchu useful :-
‘@alykhansatchu: 753,000 Shareholders keep me up at Night www.rich.co.ke #Safaricom #Kenya #Mindspeak we have M-Pesa and Data 11:20am’

A member of the audience asked a question as one of the many small shareholders (many kenyans are) which I do not remember. At that point I thought to myself that perhaps Bob’s Pensive tone whenever talking about his shareholders was more about Safaricom’s Major shareholder(s) - Vodafone (40%) and GoK (35%). As a Kenyan and a very small shareholder, I have continued to be frustrated by Safaricom’s disinterest in regional expansion - to Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and the rest of Africa. Bob confirmed my fears when he replied to a related question, saying that that Safaricom was simply not looking at a geographical diversification (regional expansion) strategy.

I have touched on Safaricom’s options for future growth in previous posts. Bob’s answer on the ‘would-be natural’ strategy of regional expansion reminded me of observations in those past articles. By virtue of Vodafone’s 40% ownership of Safaricom’s and them (Vodafone) having other subsidiaries in Uganda and Tanzania, a constraint is placed at the board level on any Safaricom ambition to enter the markets outside Kenya. Such is Vodafone’s influence over Safaricom’s future that any thoughts of venturing into other regional markets must consider Vodafone’s existing interests on the (foreign) ground.

The above constraint in my analysis has seriously limited Safaricom’s options for growth and remains its Achille’s heel. I have also argued previously that it is vodafone’s interests that cost Safaricom its ‘rightful’ stake in the ownership of the M-PESA patent. Consider that in one of the Bob’s answers during the MindSpeak, he reiterated the position that Michael Joseph - his predecessor had been retained by Vodafone among other things to be its ‘M-PESA ambassador’. Both Michael and Bob are Vodafone appointees. It should not take much rationalisation therefore to understand that Safaricom’s leadership will always steer the company away from competition with other Vodafone’s interests in Africa and elsewhere.

The feeling that Safaricom is not being genuine about releasing an API for kenyan developers to integrate business services with M-PESA is increasingly widespread. Safaricom is not convincing either, that the delay in releasing this widely clamoured for feature is not about Vodafone/foreign interests. I did not find Bob’s answer to a related question adequate - that the delay was due to security concerns. Its been over two years since Kenyan developers started clamouring for the API and there are no signs yet of it coming soon.

Perception of Competition

Bob’s perception of Safaricom’s competition can be summarised in at least two tweets below:-
‘@alykhansatchu: #Mindspeak Airtel can afford to destroy The #Kenya Market We cannot @bobcollymore www.rich.co.ke #Africa 11:21am’
‘@gmeltdown: #mindspeak safaricom has to pay for armed patrol on their fiber cable to fend off vandalism - says Bob 10:33’

Bob and others in Safaricom wished for the audience to believe that Airtel’s super low prices for voice and SMS were meant to destroy Kenya’s mobile network industry. See my article in October 2010 on Airtel’s move. Although I do not wish to go into the discussion in the first tweet, my take is that Airtel Kenya is only trying to cut down Safaricom’s market dominance of about 80% market share to lower manageable levels. Cutting down Safaricom’s market share will not destroy the industry in my view.

The second tweet is about Vandalism of the inland terrestrial optic fiber cables layed out by the competing data connectivity providers in the recent months. The vandalism depicts difficulties and costs inherent in Kenya’s business environment. Although Bob saw a pattern to imply competitor sponsored vandalism, it appears that Kenya government is not doing enough to provide security of investor’s assets. Obviously the security issue contributes greatly to Kenya’s attractiveness as an investment destination. A lot has been written about the cable vandalism and there is hope that the government will eventually bring the menace under control.

Customer Focus

To many Kenyans, Customer service is Safaricom’s biggest problem. Considering its huge customer base, it is on the same matter of customer care that Safaricom can argue to be the strongest among its competitors. I have previously argued that Customer Focus is one of the significant battle fronts among Kenya’s MNOs whose winner will collect for themselves many points in the dominance war.

I was particularly impressed by Bob Collymore’s articulation of his intentions to direct Safaricom’s corporate culture towards customer focus. His thoughts that Safaricom could not make the mistake of outsourcing its customer service (call centres) were quite profound. In a demonstration of seriousness about customer focus, Bob went ahead to express his desire for attributes like honesty, relevance, simplicity, ease of use and listening to customers in its products and customer interactions.

With the noble intentions on customer focus well articulated by Bob, then I could only come up with the tweets below :-

‘@gmeltdown: #mindspeak Bob wants safaricom to embrace customer obsession as a way of life. 10:53am’
‘@gmeltdown: #mindspeak an array of customer focus intentions presented by bob. hoping safaricom will wall the talk. 10:56am’.

As a user of most of Safaricom’s products, I must say that their quality of customer service can vary greatly with their categorization of customers (post paid and prepaid) and with the various products (M-PESA, voice, and data connectivity). It is this variability in quality of customer service that would need to disappear for many to believe the good intentions articulated by Bob.

In Conclusion

To conclude this long post it is worth noting that as the competition among Kenya’s MNOs shift gears, a complex multiplicity of parameters will have to be watched by each player.

Emerging battle fronts for Safaricom, Orange, Yu and Airtel Kenya

2010-11-29T21:19:00.000+03:00

Emerging battle fronts for Safaricom, Orange, Yu and Airtel Kenya

It has been correctly observed that for the Kenyan Mobile Network Operator (MNO) the voice market is only a cash cow in a wide array of business ventures and revenue streams. Last week I wrote about the epic battle between Safaricom and Airtel in the voice and Short Message Service (SMS) market. I shall call these engagements battles as they appear to be quite a number along a couple of frontiers that our MNOs will need to fight it out over time. This is all in the bigger, long term war among the operators for favor with Kenyan consumers.

In this post, I shall share some quick, simple thoughts on the various market frontiers

The mobile money frontier

Safaricom’s M-PESA service in Kenya has in the past two years become a globally acclaimed success. It has revolutionised lives in Kenya. The country has also become an attractive market for products building on innovations around mobile money. All the other three MNOs have declared that they are not being left behind in the long term quest for revenues in this market and are propping up their counter-offerings to M-PESA. I have previously written about some of the sectors key success factors and potential pitfalls the you might wish to explore. I shall steer clear of further associated debate in this post.

The data connectivity services frontier

Earlier in 2010, Moses Kemibaro, a reknown Kenyan blogger also wrote on how Safaricom was slated to become the largest Inernet Service Provider (ISP) in Kenya. It appears Orange and Yu have since taken the cue and began engaging Safaricom on yet another battle - the mobile internet service connectivity battle. The battle on this frontier is bound to be so ruthless that traditional ISPs might be driven to the peripheries by the better funded, increasingly resolute MNOs.

The online content frontier

In this frontier we expect to see more activity in the online content vending and advertising segments. Incidentally there are both international and local - home grown players in this market segment that the MNOs will have to contend with. The MNOs will at various points experience the might of global online content players. These are the likes of Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft and their interactions might include mutually beneficial partnerships or direct competition. Then there are the local content players, blessed with expert knowledge of the local culture and social landscape. It will be interesting to see how local niche markets emerge as local content developers become more creative in partnerships with the MNOs.

The customer focus frontier

In Kenya we are more used to the term customer care. With ISO, ITIL and other global best practices becoming more popular among Kenyan firms, the usual contention on definition of terms will be unavoidable. However, whether we call it customer care, customer service or customer focus, this is the battle front whose intricacies are a little less obvious. Controversial matters on patriotic emotions and corporate social responsibility will remain customer focus concerns. However the matter of actual service delivery and support will become significant game changers. I shall reserve further arguments on this for a separate future post as opportunities arise.

The usual conclusions
On each of these battle fronts, it appears that we shall not be confined to the boredom of watching the usual two main protagonists (Airtel and Safaricom) fighting it out. Orange and Yu are already taking firm positions and claiming serious stakes on the new frontiers. These newer players are pretty much announcing that they shall not be mere by-standers.

It is almost obvious that the above competition will result in consumers receiving better services. They will be better facilitated to lead productive lives. Kenyan professionals will be engaged to come up with more innovative services whose success could be replicated to the rest of the world. M-PESA should be a good example on how great innovations can come from Africa. Sadly for some, the obscene profits margins experienced by dominant players previously will not be feasible. In the end we shall have created a more robust knowledge-based economy.

Finally, the pleasant realization from the promise of these impending battles is that in all the instances the consumer and the country wins.

Airtel Kenya vs Safaricom - When the bulls fought

2010-11-26T03:59:00.007+03:00

Misplaced Application of Old Wisdom
An old swahili saying goes like ''Wapingapo fahali wawili, ziumiazo ni nyasi'. It means 'When two bulls fight, it is the grass that suffers'. When applied to competition in Kenya’s mobile network operator industry, it would mean that where two heavy weight players battle it out, it is the consumers that suffer.

I do not intend to despise the wisdom of our long gone ancestors but once in a while I am convinced we need to test some of the old wisdom for relevance in our dynamic times. In the current age of information, globalization and civil liberties some of our old sayings might have acquired a 'diminished relevance' status. When two large companies fight it is most likely for the attention of the consumer and the swahili saying may not apply to the situation.

The initial battle front
In October 2010, Airtel took on the mobile network market by storm, drastically lowering calling rates to Kes 3 (USD .038) regarless of the call destination network. Ostensibly this was a direct attack on Safaricom's dominance on the mobile communication market by a fairly capable opponent. There are those who did not believe that Airtel Kenya, then trading as Zain Kenya would sustain their ‘outrageously low rates’ - not previously imagined. We are such a pessimistic market that at some point some of our popular radio stations had call-in discussions whereby Airtel's move was ridiculed off to be unsustainable and suicidal.

Peculiar perceptions
We had got comfortable with then then reality that meaningful un-rushed mobile phone conversations were a reserve of those of us who were top of the pyramid consumers. The radio airwaves were filled with talk of either how Airtel was an unfortunate and disruptive spoiler or how Airtel had been brave enough to take the mighty Safaricom head on. What argument a caller or presenter would front on air would be largely dependent the following :-

How accustomed they had become to Safaricom's high call rates about Kes. 11 (USD .138) and hence they were basically resisting change.

How well they understood the fact that lower calling rates were good for the national economy

What liberating effect they felt as they embraced the new reality of lower personal and business communication costs

What sentimental and patriotic feelings were aroused in them by the common impression that Safaricom was 'our homegrown company' and that ‘our company’ was under attack

It appeared as though Airtel's categorical proclamation that the new rates were not temporary offers (and were permanent rates) did not reassure the pessimists. An earlier explanation by the Ministry of Information and communication officials that the forgoing call rates had been too high above the the operators' unit costs did not seem to convince the pessimists either.

Counter-offers and Tactical Retreat
Safaricom reacted with a temporary counter-offer to Airtel's new price. Orange Kenya and Essar's Yu also reacted with similar counter offers. The time limit for the temporary offers has since lapsed and it now appears that Safaricom has eventually embraced the price contest brought to their doorstep by Airtel. This week Safaricom began offering their new rates dubbed ‘Uwezo Tarrif’ of Kes. 3 (USD .038)per minute for on-net calls and Kes 4 (USD .050) per minute for off-net calls. They are also rewarding their more loyal post-pay customers with a flat rate of Kes 3.0 per minute regardless of the network - a rate identical to Airtels price structure. What is now more awakening for the price war pessimists is the fact that now Safaricom is mimicking Airtel in telling their customer that the new tariff is permanent and not an offer.

One might argue that Airtel has won its first battle - in cutting down the obscene revenues that Safaricom has been scooping from their voice business which has been its cash cow. Airtel might also argue out their advantage in that considering their network agnostic tariff structure, they remain the better option for the price sensitive, liberated voice consumers. Proponents of Safaricom’s tactics will easily argue that they have won this first battle after cautiously bringing down their tariff close to Airtel’s level - hence containing further erosion of their most valuable asset which is their subscriber base (about 78% of line subscriptions).

The winner is WE!
Whichever way you look at it, there is one clear winner of this battle - the consumer. The cost of voice communication has plummeted - about three times down. A few weeks back I argued in an article how Kenya's knowledge-based economy stands affected favourably by these new developments. It is such a basic principle that it is hard to understand the psychology of those of us who were initially pessimistic about Airtel's bold move to pick up the ‘price war’ with Safaricom. Incidentally, from reader comments, there are those of us who still find it hard to drop their emotional attachments to the protagonists. Thus it remains hard for the people to start seeing themselves as the ultimate gainers.

Quite predictably, the war between Safaricom and Airtel in Kenya will be won a battle at a time. I shall propose that in all the battles, the winner will neither be Safaricom, nor Airtel. It will not be more peripheral players (Yu and Orange) either. The winner will continue to be WE the consumers!

Basic conclusion
The Swahili saying above may have situations of relevance in today's world dynamics. The saying however should not be loosely invoked in situations where market forces are in play. It is easily apparent that whatever platform the bulls (mobile network operators) will fight on, the consumer will be the ultimate beneficiary. In addition, to apportion credit where it is due, these benefits to the citizen will occur not by accident, but by the design of the Kenya Communications Act 1998 and its implementers (for example) in government. This and other legislations such as the Kenya Communucation (Ammendment) act 2009 have done much to create conducive environment for a vibrant ICT sector in Kenya. The environment is not perfect lest you get me wrong. But Dr. Bitange Ndemo and others are still working hard to continually improve the operating environment - Check out the www.information.go.ke site for more legislative efforts in the pipeline.

Tribulations of the M-PESA Agent

2010-11-12T04:49:00.002+03:00

M-PESA is the mobile money transfer platform introduced in Kenya by Safaricom - Kenya's arguably dominant mobile network operator. It is a fact that M-PESA has revolutionized lifestyles of Kenyans in the last three years. To-date there are about 20,000 M-PESA agents in Kenya according to statistics from Safaricom. It is the extensive network of M-PESA outlets that Michael Joseph - former CEO of Safaricom attributes to the phenomenal success of the M-PESA money transfer system (see my notes on ‘reflections with MJ’ in October 2010). Although the former CEO's assertion remains arguable, the significance of the agents and their outlets cannot be overstated in analyzing the money transfer system's success.

Recently I engaged a couple of M-PESA agents in some discourse to try and understand their contribution to the platform's success. Perhaps it is because of our age old tendency to complain over everything that I caught a few concerns that would qualify to be the 'Miseries of the M-PESA agent'. Here are some :-

1. SMS trickery
M-PESA in Kenya is revolves around SMS texts exchanged between individuals, agents and suppliers as 'promissory notes'. The promissory notes in form of text messages are guaranteed by M-PESA agents deposits with Safaricom (also known as float) through a trust deed (read more on this and an early 2009 systems audit report). With the maturity of M-PESA as part and parcel of our society, even the fraudsters have jumped on board to make their contribution in the diverse society. Agents have in the recent months fallen prey to these 'cleverer' citizens who send fake system withdrawal messages at outlets. Unsuspecting attendants failing to scan the entire SMS message for authenticity dish out money only to discover the trickery when the fraudsters has vanished.

For readers wondering just how that can happen see an earlier post on this blog of a 'transcript' detailing a real example of such an incident. Of greater concern to the agent is the fact that their contract with Safaricom pushes liability for such losses to the hapless agent.

It might be easy to say that the amounts stolen by the fraudsters using this method is little and theoretically limited to Ksh.35,000 (Approx USD 440) per instance. However those who are privy to operational details of small enterprises like M-PESA outlets might know that once an outlet is hit with theft of such an amount, it could take months to recover. A complete closure is also possible for such affected outlets.

2. Service Outages
Earlier in the week of 8th November 2010, Safaricom put out advertisement in traditional press and social media notifying M-PESA users of a scheduled downtime that would last most of the weekend from Saturday 13th 9pm to Monday 15th 6am. The scheduled outage would be due to a planned upgrade of the money transfer platform. A service outage for a whole day meant loss of a day's worth of revenue (commissions) by agents. The planned upgrade was later suspended on 11th November 2010, supposedly due to other unrelated outages of the Safaricom data network, that had to be brought under control first. I was curiously shocked to learn that Safaricom had a reason to bring down a service so critical to Kenya's economy for over 32 hours. For a moment then I thought service availability was not an important service quality metric to Safaricom. I defer my curiosity for now until they announce the new upgrade schedule.

Scheduled outages not withstanding, it is not rare for M-PESA agents to be found helpless by customers who cannot be served because 'the network is down'. The same is experienced by customers themselves from their phone when thet occasionally try to transfer money to others only to get a message that their transfer was not successful (to try again after ten minutes). Worse cases of service reliability affect M-PESA agents when a customer deposits money and there is a delay in the receiving the deposit confirmation text (on the customer's phone). The agent is left in a precarious position of mistrust with an impatient customer who might not believe that their confirmation message will eventually come (perhaps after 20 minutes).

It is these planned and unplanned system outages (or degraded performance) that occasionally make the M-PESA agent a helpless businessman. Their supplier is also so powerful that they have no chance of negotiating favorable service level agreements to protect their small businesses from effects of such diminished service quality. Safaricom deserve a little more credit though. From the planned upgrade, it appears they have realized a need to improve the quality of their service (including increasing maximum transaction throughput from 70 to 200 transactions per second). Although the planned platform improvement might alleviate some of the recurrent outages, the little bargaining power of the agents will remain a matter of concern.

3. Employee theft
A blog post by @coldtusker sometime last year once attempted to highlight the culture of dishonesty among other costs of doing business in Kenya. Dishonesty can be argued to be prevalent among employees in Kenya. Arguably, the desired combination of reliability and honesty among our workforce remains quite elusive. M-PESA attendants are not aliens to the purported culture of dishonesty. It should be correct to say that mobile money transfer systems include elaborate mandatory record keeping – some of which are electronically hosted by the money transfer platform. However many people forget that for as long as attendants must handle real money at some point, a temptation to steal or divert money meant for their outlet's operations exists.

Dishonest employees combined with an inept law enforcement system means that the M-PESA agent has to pray every day for their attendants not to yield to stealing temptations. The current police and justice system is such that it may be obvious who stole but nothing beyond knowing the thief is doable. It is this ever present fear of losing an outlet's cash that can permanently keep the M-PESA agent crossing their fingers. Some insurance companies I am told offer insurance cover against such losses but with 20,000 shillings 'excess' fees for any theft instance claimed. The insurance cover then rarely to makes sense to M-PESA agents since typically lost amounts are about the same as the 'excess'.

4. Fake Currency
A couple of weeks back I was listening in to one of our morning radio shows. Then there was this exasperated caller who was narrating how someone had deposited fake 20,000 shillings notes at their M-PESA outlet. The outlet's attendant had discovered the fake notes and alerted the local police before the conman had left. The police arrived at the scene, confiscated the fake notes, and left with the conman in 'custody'. To the astonishment of the agent, the police did nothing to assist agent who had already 'received' the fake deposit - hence deducted from their float. According to the caller, the conman eventually went scot free. With the current arrangement, no form of assistance was to be expected from Safaricom for mitigating such risks since the 'nonnegotiable' liability remains the agent's.

Long Conclusion
There are many other experiences that add up to bad ordeals for M-PESA agents ranging from general risks in the external environment to business risks directly related to the nature of outlets operations. It should not surprise many that the much touted 20,000+ M-PESA agents are really not having sustainable businesses. It might also be that the extensive network of agents is the single biggest success factor of Safaricom's M-PESA platform for money transfer. In that case, with the above sentiments of M-PESA agents, it is the same factor that Safaricom has not quite controlled to their favor. Some of the M-PESA agent's troubles appear to be way out of reach in Safaricom's external environment. It is however the same environment that an entity of their size and might could work with the government to influence – for their favor. Some of the mitigation measures are as basic as additional agent capacity building.

Incidentally, Telkom Kenya have recently launched their feature rich OrangeMoney platforms. Essar Communication's Yu is inducing M-PESA agents to become YuCash agents. Bharti Airtel is also sustaining their onslaught on Safaricom's dominance on various fronts including propping up its lower priced ZAP platform. The long term success of these competing mobile network operators in the money transfer market might just as well be pegged on how aptly they handle their value chain – including their dealers and agents.

All that said, I shall try not to contradict my earlier post on value proposition to Kenyans as the ultimate success factor and suggest that “The most significant success factor for mobile money transfer operators working in Kenya will be their value proposition to Kenyan stakeholders including their customers, agents, and shareholders”. In my opinion, patriotic sentiments and feel good aspects such as corporate social responsibility will take a back seat and value drivers (including market forces) will determine future growth paths for the competing mobile network operators.

Time to Comply with EMR Systems Standards and Guidelines in Kenya

2010-11-08T21:31:00.002+03:00

A week ago I wrote about the then imminent launch of the Standards and Guidelines for electronic medical record systems in Kenya. The document was signed by both the Director of Medical Services (Dr. Francis M. Kimani) and the Director of Public Health and Sanitation (Dr. Shahnaz Kassam Shari). Another week has passed and the document has since been officially launched. It was the Director of Medical Services who launched the document on 3rd November at the Kenyatta International Conference Center on behalf of the Government of Kenya.

It has been argued that the existence of two Ministries of Health in Kenya has not been worked well for the country. However, it should be reassuring to note that the document is a product of collaborative efforts between the Ministry of Medical Services and the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation. National AIDS and STI Control Program (NASCOP) which is placed in the Public Health and Sanitation Ministry was a key contributor to the document’s development. The Division of Health Information Systems (HIS) has been the leader of the effort as it pursues its vision to “Be a centre of excellence for quality health and health-related data and information for use by all.” For more on the division’s strategic plan see an older article I wrote in 2009. The Division of HIS is placed in the Ministry of Medical Services.

It is noteworthy that the EMR implementation initiatives have been driven largely by a need to run the country’s Anti-Retroviral Treatment (ART) programs more efficiently. Development of EMR systems has however grown beyond merely addressing ART programs.

The Division of HIS also envisions a country health care system with “EMR systems that support the provision of holistic health care while improving on health records management and contributing to improved quality of patient care.”

It should be noteworthy therefore that the Division of HIS has taken the lead in championing implementation of EMR systems, not only for clinics with specific disease programs but also for an entire health facilities medical interactions.

In the previous post I highlighted some of the benefits of the standards and guidelines as well as some of the document’s weaker areas. A wide circulation of the document should in itself be a milestone for the government which is often accused of producing documents it fails to distribute widely for implementation and reference. In this post I shall rest at providing readers with a link to the actual document

Hopefully all stakeholders will start referring to it and complying appropriately - this is the line where I get to force relevance to this article’s title.

Along Came Standards and Guidelines for EMR Systems in Kenya

2010-10-31T15:12:00.007+03:00

An Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is defined as a computerized medical record created in an organization that delivers care, such as a hospital and doctor's surgery - (in wikipedia). EMR systems, information systems used in health facilities to manage EMRs have remained a popular topic of discussion among Kenya's eHealth initiative's over the last five years.

A knowledge-based economy

A nation wide adoption of EMR systems in Kenya promises to increase effectiveness of the national health care system from policy making, to financing, and to service delivery at health facilities. This is by strengthening the practice of knowledge management in health care. Among other things, it would support evidence-informed decision making at the various service delivery levels of the national health system.

A health care system in Kenya with efficient knowledge management and decision making will not only create a healthier and more economically productive Nation. It will also foster development and harnessing of such knowledge as a resource for wealth creation within and across Kenya’s borders.

Entrenched Fragmentation

A significant number of fragmented, strongly entrenched and donor funded EMR systems have come into existence at our health facilities over the last decade. The fragmented initiatives have diverse approaches to issues like stakeholder inclusiveness, health data ownership, systems development and support, systems ownership and sustainability. The total cost of ownership (TCO) profiles of the fragmented initiatives are also diverse. They range from low cost open source community supported systems to high cost vendor supported systems thriving on the occasional waves of donor funding.

With the fairly uncoordinated setting above, the debate on a road-map for nationwide adoption of EMR systems has been emotive if not controversial over the years. About 6 years ago, in August 2004 to be specific, the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting of EMR systems stakeholders in Nairobi. The stakeholders included National AIDS Control Programs of five African countries, clinicians and developers of EMR sytems and learning experts.

Delayed conclusion of matters

The WHO meeting of August 2004 recognised among other things that “development and implementation of EMRs in Africa has resulted in numerous small projects without data content or data exchange standards, running the risk of creating a fragmented and chaotic information environment in which national data reporting and mobile patient tracking would be severely impaired;”

In recognising the above challenge, the same meeting also called upon the WHO to “work with partners including African Ministries of Health, the CDC, developers of EMR systems used for Africa, and clinicians to establish basic standards to allow interoperability, mobile patient tracking, and the possibility of national and cross national data mining.” To further quote the meeting’s report, The WHO’s support was also to recognize the fact that “These standards include electronic information exchange standards, agreement on the approach to core minimal data sets, and the establishment of a common data dictionary”.

The state of affairs

6 years later, Kenya has continued suffer an unduly protracted debate on EMR initiatives whose systems are nowhere near nationwide, cannot inter-change data and are without a common concept dictionary. More information on the August 2004 meeting and some of WHOs initiatives on Knowledge management platforms for clinical care can be found here. It remains difficult to understand why it has taken long to confront the challenges highlighted in the meeting. The explanation can get as complex as the stakeholder’s interests.

Major strides forward

It should be with some relief that stakeholders will be seeing the official launch of the 'Standards and Guidelines for EMR systems in Kenya' this November. The standard and guidelines document has been developed with the support of PEPFAR through I-TECH, a collaboration between the University of Washington and the University of California, San Francisco. Development of the document has also benefited extensively from the leadership of the government’s Division of Health Information Systems and the National STI and AIDS Control Program (NASCOP).

The document should go a long way to improve the framework and environment for development, deployment and implementation of EMR systems in Kenya. It attempts to leverage on recognized national and international standards for health informatics. The document also attempts to build on learning from experiences of historical EMR system implementations.

In the document’s section two, it sets national standards for information interchange and interoperability. This will help to foster information exchange between EMR systems at different health facilities. This should address among other issues mobility of health care clients. The interoperability standards will help foster a deliberate awareness among EMR systems of pharmacy information systems, district health information systems, financial management systems and other subsystems in a health facility’s enterprise architecture.

The document’s section 4 on governance and policy attempts to set standards for systems ownership, TCO profiles and sustainability. It also goes further to set a standard for health data ownership. The document also spells out the responsibility of the Division of Health Information Systems to ensure the standards are enforced. The possibility of this responsibility being delagated to NASCOP and other disease programs is also specified in the document.

Areas of improvement

As with a majority of standards documents, The ‘Standards and Guidelines for EMR systems in Kenya’ still has much room for improvement. One of the weakness could be how the document addresses “the approach to core minimal data sets, and the establishment of a common data dictionary” - identified in the August 2004 WHO meeting. A gray area remains on how well the use of medical concepts and terminologies can be standardised for uniformity and comparability of data held or shared across computer systems.

The apparent inadequate engagement of stakeholders in the ICT industry in developing the standards and guidelines can also be flagged against the document. For such a document, there would have been a need to seek the views of the ICT private sector - companies and private practitioners. If the synergies such as those described in my earlier article on EMRs sytems and the Kenya software industry are to be pursued, future enhancements of the document would require a meaningful engagement of the ICT industry. Key players in Kenya’s ICT landscape include the Kenya ICT Board, the Directorate of e-Government and professional communities such as the iHub and KICTANET.

An evolving set of standards and guidelines

Although the document could arguably have some weaknesses, the document was cautious enough to invite readers to view its content as ‘evolving guidelines’. It proposes to be a ‘living document’ and states that “the process to identify and agree upon EMR requirements and recommendations presented in this document is more important than the guidelines contained in this initial version”. Dr Patrick Odawo, I-TECH’s Country Director also indicated that they would set up an official forum for discussing the document and its continual improvements on the Google Groups platform.

For readers interested in more insights about standards for EMR systems and their practical implications, I shall embed a video of a presentation made by Dr. Paul Biondich of OpenMRS two years ago.
The presentation touches on the possibility of having standardized concept dictionaries for vocabulary management. It was made during a WHO conference on data standards in December 2007

Bharti Airtel’s Muted Contribution to Kenya’s Knowledge-based Economy

2010-10-27T01:21:00.005+03:00

Tweet triggered

In the afternoon of 23rd October 2010 I posted this micro-post (tweet): “Thinking telcos' price competition for voice market is contributing silently to Kenya's knowledge economy” As usual I got a couple of reactions. The reactions set off my intentions to say more and justify my thoughts - as it were, in this article, outside twitter’s confinement of 140 characters.

A knowledge based economy can be viewed from Peter Drucker’s work in the 90s as “an economy based on intangible goods and intellectual capital as the economic driver”. To also quote Vern McCorkle the late publisher of Alaska Business Monthly magazine, “In our traditional capitalist economy, a knowledge-based economy stands in sharp contrast to long-established economic theory because it relies upon innovation and intellectual capital rather than hard goods to generate economic value.”

Perhaps in the tweet I should have used the phrase knowledge-based economy as opposed to knowledge economy, then I should have pre-emptied some of the confusion. However I shall insist that the competition among Kenya’s mobile network operators for both the Voice and SMS markets on the basis of price is contributing significantly to the growth of the country’s knowledge-based economy.

Bharti Airtel’s Daredevil Onslaught

I am attributing the benefits of plummeting communication costs to Bharti Airtel because their Zain Kenya LTD outfit is the ‘chief protagonists’ in ‘the war’. They have boldly and almost recklessly been taking the price war to the invincible player - Safaricom LTD. Whether Bharti Airtel’s artillary for the war includes the deep pockets of their extensive and diversified global business empire will be discussion for another day.

Not to forget the role of the regulator, it is noteworthy that the price wars followed the lowering of interconnection charges by Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK). Safaricom tried to use its market share muscle and well calculated network lock-in tactics to resist the expected fall in prices. At the same time Bharti Airtel has tried rather successfully to neutralise Safaricom’s network lock-in tactics by offering a network agnostic price structure. To a number of observers including Safaricom’s Michael Joseph, Bharti Airtel’s network agnostic pricing structure appears to be like a deliberate loss making strategy for the medium term. Many think it is largely financed from sources other than their expected revenue.

For a this moment I invite readers to forget the fairly inconsequential concern of who will win the war and the fact that outgoing Safaricom’s CEO predicts that the war will be won by Safaricom. I shall let us concentrate on the war’s net effects on Kenya’s knowledge-based economy.

For purposes of the forgoing argument, I shall lazily assume it is safe to estimate the current average drop in prices to be by least three times - roughly to an average of Ksh 3 per minute for voice calls and Ksh 1.5 per SMS. My other presumption is it appears safe to say that we are talking about huge permanent price cuts with permanent economic effects - seeing that Bharti Airtel’s Zain asserts that their new revolutionary pricing structure is permanent and not an offer.

I shall propose two effects specific to Kenya’s knowledge-based economy which I consider significant but currently muted in the sense that they may not be visible on the surface.

Effects on Decision Making

The drop in communication costs means that those Kenyans who have had X shillings monthly communication budget can retain their budget while upgrading their voice conversations and text messages to a higher level of communication quality and fidelity. In many cases, mobile communication has now been enriched from typically short ineffective exchange of messages (mostly instructions) to more meaningful discussions, deliberations, negotiations, and whatever other form of advanced knowledge exchange.

The more effective communication above (Voice or SMS) lends itself favourably for applications of knowledge transfer among correspondents. The increased knowledge exchange among communication correspondents implies improved, evidence based decisions in our economic sectors.

The resulting effect will be more obvious in the Jua Kali sector where the former prohibitive cost profiles reduced mobile communication to rushed, curt, ineffective conveyance of important information. These productive participants in the economy now have an increased luxury to meaningfully consult their mentors, peers, suppliers, consumers on more cost effective and efficient ways of delivering their value propositions.

The effect might appear more subtle but significant nonetheless among our larger enterprises. This will happen when consultative processes are leveraged with improved enterprise level communication using the significantly less resources as a result of an ‘enhanced’ communication budget.

Effects on Knowledge Distribution

The huge gap between the economic haves and have nots in Kenya may be easily attributed to disparities in the distribution of traditional wealth generation factors like land, labor and capital. However, to quote Peter Drucker again, “The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labour. It is and will be knowledge”. I suggest that unequal knowledge distribution is a significant contributor to Kenya’s large economic disparities. I also suggest that knowledge as an economic resource is most valuable when it can be communicated and used.

Information technologies such as Voice telephony and SMS messaging which are now fairly pervasive in Kenya and the world over facilitate exchange of knowledge. The apparent price wars have meant that many more Kenyans can now afford to make many more conversations on phone and can send more text messages to enforce their information exchange with more people. As more people talk and send SMS texts without being overly encumbered by the cost factor, the resultant effect should be a more even distribution of the critical knowledge that differentiates the educated wealthy from the educated poor.

The resultant effect or increased communication should be a more evenly distributed collective country knowledge base.

The logical consequence

Whether Bharti Airtel’s venture in Kenya will eventually make business sense to them will remain a ‘wait and see matter’. However what should remain important to Kenyans is the fact that reduced communication costs should translate to more evidence informed decisions and a more evenly distributed national knowledge base. This should translate to a stronger knowledge-based economy in Kenya. I shall invite the scholars to try and extend or dismiss my arguments through some more research on a couple of hypotheses in this article.

Extended Thoughts on Reflections with Michael Joseph of Safaricom

2010-10-20T19:32:00.009+03:00

This Mashujaa Day was a lazy one for me - some kind of forced day of rest to nurse a sore throat I had. On this day I got a coveted opportunity to form part of some 60pax audience at the iHubNairobi listening in to reflections from Mr. Michael Joseph. Michael or MJ as we call him is the out going CEO of Safaricom LTD - East Africa’s largest firm by corporate earnings. It was a lazy day so I really did not want to tweet through the session. Nevertheless I yielded to the temptation - as usual, and had some 32 tweets with the hash tag #mjreflections.

I was seated next to @UjenziBora who shared his intentions to blog his own tweet stream from the event. I liked the idea so here is my over-elaborated execution of the copied idea. I shall simply try and give my underlying thoughts on my ‘live-session’ tweets. I shall also number them so that when you get tired, you could go and come back to resume where you will have left.

(tweet) Peculiar site to see MJ of Safaricom in blue jeans -> (the underlying thought) I was honestly shocked to see Michael Joseph in blue jeans, away from his corporate suit and tie signature look.
(tweet) Per minute billing would have made more business sense but Safaricom could not afford the system then -> (the underlying thought) Michael had to make the best of what he did not have. He settled for the lesser revenue option of per second billing and invested in marketing to consumers the truth that per second billing was better for them than Kencell’s per minute billing
One more lesson - please don't surprise your customers - not even for free things -> Personally I don’t mind pleasant surprises like some free KES 800 airtime. As a businessman, I still won’t mind but would execute surprises with guarded caution.
MJ admits M-PESA, okoa jahazi, Sambaza etc were not invented in Kenya -> My regular readers might already know that the origin and ownership of the MPESA innovation is one of the topics I get a little over-patriotic about.
2m pounds went into the initial MPESA software by Vodafone - after some DfID competition -> These appeared to be MJ’s distractionary way of pre-empting the emotive debate of why Safaricom does not own the patent for M-PESA. In my mind he is not off the hook yet. But its too late, Kenyans have already made M-PESA indispensable, under the impression it was their (Safaricom’s) intellectual property.
Success of #MPESA is not the technology, it is the distribution network -> This I agreed with partially. However I shall continue to insist on marketing blitz and a sense of nationalism around the product being additional ingredients
IT guys have learnt the art of giving excuses when things go down -> At that point MJ appeared silently agitated about some technical hitch - I felt him. IT guys have an annoying way of assuming that embarrassing situations are acceptable to blame on technology.
There is no redundancy for the TEAMS cable - where it lands in mombasa - Plans to arrange for redundancy in Dar es Saalam -> With the technical hitch in tweet 7, MJ was distracted away from M-PESA to data services. I did not like his way of justifying sustained high data prices - redundancy of to Optic fiber cable at the landing points, onward connectivity to the internet beyond under sea cables, etc. We need another big connectivity provider to dislodge Safaricom from an exploitative dominance position which they are gettin to.
MJ thinks Safaricom will win the 'War' with Airtel Bharti - prefers not to call it 'Price War' -> May the best value proposition to Kenyans win!
Best advice MJ got was 'You have to make decisions yourself' even if once in a while you go wrong -> That obviously worked for him, problem might be how much further this style had got into Safaricom’s corporate blood. Can Safaricom survive a different kind of leadership?
MJ of Safaricom has never read more than 5 pages of any business book -> I was forced to read many such pages for my MBA. I think experience is an expensive teacher. No further comments
MJ is not a great fun of social media. He thinks his successor is though -> We can only wait and see how @bobcollymore , the new man at the helm fairs as he sounds like a completely different kind of guy. Hoping though he wont start off with RFP’s for change management consultants. I am told Bob Collymore will be the guest at Aly Khan Satchu's Mindspeak event on 4th December 2010.
MJ appeals to bloggers and others to use social media sensibly - not to spread falsehoods etc -> I agree. I always try my best and hope my best is good enough
MJ would not consider outsourcing customer care - it is so tempting yet so critical as far as he is concerned -> That was so clever of him. I agree with the principle, but when he gave the purported reason of creating local jobs near JKIA I was not convinced.
For BPO we cant just rely on the fact that we speak english, or are in a good time zone. We have to deliver quality -> This I really liked and I really hope the Vision 2030 implementation secretariat is listening in
To MJ, this BPO thing is overrated in Kenya's vision 2030 - I also agree -> See Tweet 15
Safaricom expects payback from their base stations within one year, most of them pay back within 6 months -> I don’t know enough to comment but @mwolooto thought Safaricom was not being fair to someone - I can't tell how
Solar energy for BTS makes sense only when air cooling is not required - I didnt know that -> Going green should make economic sense a lot of times. It appears this its not all the time though
MJ would indulge in local capacity building only because it makes financial sense - sort of CSR view I dont like -> At the time of tweeting this I had got me incensed with MJ sounding like financial sense was all about being seen to undertake Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) - hence increased revenue. I don’t understand why many multinational(ish) companies do not recognize the need to build local capacity as strategic inputs for their own local business processes. Creating jobs as CSR will always appear as though one is after sanitize their acts of exploitation!
MJ is seriously not convincing on local capacity building reasons - methinks it should be more about economic synergies -> My instant rant on tweet 19 above - wont comment more
MJ of Safaricom never believed in the idea of changing ringback tones. Now regrets ceding more revenue share than would have allowed -> Was great to see that even the mighty in Kenya can wink and get out-witted
MJ of Safaricom now asserts that MKESHO is his (personal) idea - interesting < Great revelation. I need a followup on my ealier post on MKESHO as a hint to more intrigues to come. I pray the exclusivity ends soon
Safaricom's deal with Equity on MKESHO ends next year - that should be good riddance to some -> See tweet 22, no
Safaricom CEO @iHubNairobi,we will be launching M-PESA buy goods on Friday,u can pay for shopping @Uchumi with M-PESA -> I was re-tweeting an interesting announcement through Safaricom’s official twitter account. Too much to talk about there - wont start
700,000 M-KESHO accounts in three months other banks want to cash in also -> See tweet 22
Safaricom will make it possible to pay for items via MPesa from Friday at Uchumi branches See tweet 24 - so shall the MPESA queue stall when there are delayed SMS notifications?
Safaricom needs the banks - will address the exclusivity issue. They probably will not do it with Stanchart or Stanbic -> I could read Michaels bad blood with Stanchart from his lips as he said this. Could it be because they gave banking partnership to Zain for ZAP-the would be rival to MPESA?
I like MJ's passion around #MPESA, gets carried away by the topic -> Great passion this man has, I can’t help but think he might be secretly sharing a stake with Vodafone on the MPESA patent.
Really what's business enabling about paying a license to a regulator? -> It’s hard to tell when the regulator is genuinely seeking funds to protect consumers
Consistency of management contributed to safaricom's market share staying at 80% over a couple of years -> Now Safaricom must face the inevitable moment of changing guard. Good luck after some really strong/autocratic leadership
RT @tonymuny: I hope there is no fee involved when paying 4 goods in uchumi via mpesa -> I had to retweet the concern raised therein - someone I met at Uchumi indicates that there should be no extra transaction charge to the customer in the planned arrangement. See tweet 24 also
MJ of Safaricom thinks he is one person that does not admit defeat at all --> I shall not rule out the possibility of someone else admitting defeat at Safaricom - many months after MJ has left

With all that said, may the best value proposition to Kenyans win!

I most probably missed some big insights while I was tweeting away the session with Michael. I recommend you also check out @UjenziBora's post for a different if not complementary post-event-analysis based on his live tweets.

Signs of a Growing eHealth Sector in Kenya

2010-09-24T22:01:00.004+03:00

Today I had this nice opportunity to partially attend a PEPFAR partners meeting at the Safari Park Hotel. I shall not assume it is obvious that PEPFAR stands for (United States) President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Kenya is said to be one of the countries with the biggest allocation of PEPFAR grants, largely through USAID and CDC. Every year, billions of Kenya Shillings are handled as grants from PEPFAR within the country, so much so that it is almost a sub-economy in itself. PEPFAR, essentially the philanthropy of the American People appears so immense in the health sector that the aid should ideally overflow to the ICT sector through eHealth. For more on related development dynamics see my earlier post on who really are our genuine development partners.

Over time, PEPFAR leadership may have discovered that it is not possible to practice philanthropy in the air - it has to be in someone's jurisdiction - who needs to care that they Americans are being philanthropic. Although the partners meeting I attended was full of representatives of NGOs supported by PEPFAR, it struck me how the agenda and presentations had undertones of leadership and control by the government. It was also impressive to see the relatively young and professional representation from the government.

Perhaps some readers will frown or cringe at the thought of government stewardship of the eHealth agenda. Consider the scenario where donor funded NGOs have to use this nice MS Access Application developed by this wonderful self taught American Programmer. That would be a self made 'geek' sitting at some place in the US offering great support and maintenance whenever MS Access bugs crop up or whenever the dismal functionality MS Access must be pushed to some impossible limits. Of course once in a while there is also a need for them to offer support on matters like 'which Microsoft Office 2003 service pack to install' and so on. You might also say that I am not the greatest fun of Microsoft products or proprietary systems. However Kenya is a country with quite a wealth of job seeking, highly skilled, economically frustrated software developers - some of them quite accomplished. The picture appears wrong for huge sums of donor aid to a country with jobless software software developers having their 'donor aid' monitored through what might appears to be a makeshift MS Access application managed overseas.

The above picture has been possible because the government of Kenya and its economic sectors have not been keen enough to take full ownership of the aid given to the country. However, the increasing government stewardship of the eHealth agenda in Kenya promises to help in ensuring that its people and its economic sectors directly benefit from the very aid that donor initiatives purport to give. It might be fair enough for donor money to bounce back to its origin through purchase of anti-retro-viral drugs, bed nets, condoms, computers and mobile phones. However, it appears unfair for the aid to dodge our fledgling software development talent, bouncing back through the so-called technical assistance expenses like developing and supporting an MS Access application.

During the meeting which had a lot of eHealth talk, I was particularly impressed by presentations delivered by government officials. The presentations outlined progress made and planned initiatives around eHealth which included :-

A presentation of plans to rollout a District Health Information System to replace the existing MS Excel Based FTP site for health facility reporting - I gladly observed a silent drift towards DHIS2 - an open source platform that could challenge the use of the KePMS system. A proposed overall initial implementation budget of Ksh 54M appeared realistic to me (peanuts for donors).
A presentation and demonstration of the Community Based Program Activity Reporting (COBPAR) system - developed in-house at the National AIDS Control Council on an Open Source Platform (currently only available through their VPN).
A presentation on the almost ready standards for EMR systems in the country (with functional/ interoperability profiles and guidelines for implementation and human resource capacity building). Government seems to have seen the sense that it only needs to encourage an environment of efficient interoperability - away from an earlier drift to push for a default national EMR system (read controversial).
A clarification that the division of Health Information Systems is pursuing ideas around building an enterprise architecture (EA) for systems in the the health sector - see my earlier post on the importance of EA
Some profound thoughts on NASCOP's strategy for HIV/AIDS and STI disease surveillance (to be supported by eHealth sub-systems)

One might say that success of eHealth initiatives is a default expectation and that 'government can only be interfering'. I would disagree and see the important role of government in providing the conducive environment for eHealth systems flourishing and efficiently co-existing. Government involvement is also a sure way of ensuring that eHealth initiatives are efficiently tapping from our donor generosity. If the current trend is upheld and protected from adverse political changes, eHealth initiatives including OpenMRS, DHIS2, Child Count, iDart, Jacaranda Health , FrontlineSMS:medic and others are destined for success in Kenya.

Part 2 of Insights from the 5th Annual OpenMRS Meeting

2010-09-22T00:41:00.007+03:00

A couple of days back I wrote my first article on the the fifth annual OpenMRS implementers meeting. Immediately after posting the article I checked my meeting notes and thought I would need to write on a few more insights that appeared equally profound. Consider this a continuation of the lessons I described in the earlier post.

Lesson 4. Open source is great; best with a global community
One of the big debates in many developing countries is whether to adopt an Open Source policy for their e-government initiatives. It appears key decision makers have began to appreciate the benefits of such a policy. However there needs to be further understanding that a mere application of open source technologies for development of government software systems is not enough. There is need to embrace the concept of open source from a global community perspective. A software expert or two can sit with an health care expert and develop an awesome, robust, feature-rich EMR or Pharmacy system using open source technologies. The system can easily go ahead and be deployed successfully in a health facility or two. The challenge with such an awesome system would revolve around the nature and size of its community of implementers and developers. Such challenges would begin to show when it begins to expand its scope, both in terms of number of installations and scalability of functionality.

During the meeting I confirmed the unparalleled size and diversity of the OpenMRS community - for an EMR sytem. However, the bigger learning point for me was that indeed a large and diverse community enhances chances of software supporting global best practices. I may not be placed best to comment on this a the medical or health care point of view. However description of the whole idea of OpenMRS concept collaborative (OCC) and meta-data sharing had strong indications of how powerfully the open source, multi-institution approach can influence harmonization of terminology and adoption of best practices in the health care domain. Dr. Andy Kanter’s presentation did very well to highlight the possibilities and potential around concept sharing.

From the information systems point of view, global best practices on software design and development were an underlying feature of the technical discussions - as a necessity. In this era of globalisation, I was particularly impressed by the approaches to providing services in resource-constrained environments. These I thought in due course can be perfected by developing countries and competitively propagated to developed country settings on relatively less resource-rich but essential devices like mobile phones.

In general my lesson here was that an open source system built and maintained by a small or closed community can be as inflexible and as expensive as a proprietary system. Any open source software initiative with a national or global ambition should strive to build a large community enough to sustain its growth objectives.

Lesson 5: Enterprise Architecture optimizes on resource use and unifies efforts
During one of those parallel tracks at the meeting there was this intense debate about Enterprise Architecture (EA) and OpenMRS. On my part I had long held this belief that EA was too abstract a concept to be directly relevant to a national health information systems arena. More so for a low-resource, developing country setting, the concept had unfortunately appeared to be ‘too high up there’. The turning point for me was when a participant dared the rest of us to think that “Perhaps EA is NOT too esoteric to be talking about in a low resource setting”. Of course I had to first struggle through the definition of the enterprise itself - noting that the enterprise could be ‘Myself’, a clinic, a Ministry of Health Division, A country’s health sector, or even a countrywide ‘all sectors’ as an entity.

Incidentally I got convinced during this session that a country having EA is one of the biggest success factors for achieving an effective implementation of a nationwide eHealth systems. The simplest benefit of an EA seemed to be its ability to harmonise terminology across the eHealth landscape. For instance it would reduce misunderstandings arising from the lack of a distinction between roles of constituent components such as the EMR, the HMIS system, the Supply chain management system, the Communuty Health Worker system and so on. Where there are many stakeholders, EAs assists every contributor to the national enterprise architecture to focus efforts on the functional and interoperability profiles of envisaged components. Such critical understanding has immense potential to reduce duplication of efforts and wastage of expensive donor money in the developing world.

Furthermore, with EA’s ability to unify national stakeholders around technically sound functional and interoperability profiles, it was regarded in the discussions as an important cushion if not a weapon against the ever looming adverse political changes in our health ministries.

There were endless lessons and insights in the meeting and you might guess I still have a couple of more thoughts worth writing about. I shall leave that for yet another blog post.

Insights from the 5th annual OpenMRS meeting

2010-09-19T17:31:00.019+03:00

Last week I had this great opportunity to be a participant at the fifth annual OpenMRS implementers meeting in Cape Town. The meeting brought together implementers, developers and the leadership of OpenMRS. The meeting was of the 'unconference' style and being relatively less experienced with OpenMRS, I found myself simply following through the intense sessions, soaking up a lot of knowledge and insights. There were many lessons and great experiences including ideas on how to actualize the dream in my earlier post on adopting OpenMRS in Kenya. I shall try and describe three of them in this post - based on my personal synthesis.

Lesson 1: Clinical Systems Not Reporting Systems

During one of the evening discussions with Dr. Alvin Marcelo and a few others round a dinner table, I had this bulb light somewhere in my mind that 'Really, medical record systems need not be seen as reporting tools'. In fact, to some health care practitioners, that the medical records system assists in retrieving a patient's medical history and perhaps assists in diagnosis is all that should be expected of the system. To them, other information management issues including aggregation of patient and treatment statistics for what we know as monitoring and evaluation - (read reporting) is almost out of scope for a medical records system. The idea that an EMR system needs to primarily address the health care givers' information requirements at their points of care implies that national Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) and reporting needs become secondary in an EMR. These observations got me thinking that perhaps the efforts to have electronic medical records systems (EMR) in Kenya will not necessarily yield the desired expectations. In Kenya, the National STI and AIDS control program (NASCOP) and the division of Health Information Systems (HIS) in the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation have over the last couple of years been working hard towards having elaborate EMR systems used at the country's public health facilities. With the country's drive for implementation of EMR systems being 'national reporting', it appears NASCOP and the division of HIS might be better off concentrating efforts on district health information systems such as DHIS2. It should be possible to allow for diverse EMR systems that support the SDMX-HD protocol for data exchange with the DHIS system to facilitate upward aggregation of data - hence national reporting. This of-course is not to disregard the need to foster data use and M&E at the administrative level of health facilities.

Lesson 2: Symbiotic Relationships Paramount

It is fairly easy for health experts to say that the field of health information systems (eg medical record systems) is their exclusive domain. Such a perspective can be 'legitimized' by many valid arguments to the extent that the relevance of input from other professions can be seriously downplayed. Conversely, from a different perspective, information systems experts can easily 'justify' why health information systems is their domain. When these perspectives are not adequately reconciled, there exists a high probability that in an health information systems implementation, either the health or the information systems aspects will fail to be optimized on. During the meeting, several participants emphasized that the development and implementation of successful medical records system calls for a symbiotic relationship between health care professionals and IT professionals. Moreover, health information systems implementation require meaningful engagement of all would-be beneficiaries. This was well summarized in Chris Bailey's observation that "if you want the truth about an Electronic Health Records system implementation, talk to the nurse".

Lesson 3: Who and What really is OpenMRS?

Am sure this is a lingering question in most readers' minds. To me the question was answered better during the meeting. A plenary session with Dr. Paul Biondich helped to understand the idea that OpenMRS is both a global community and a software platform. It is a non-profit, multi-institution collaborative. Its mission is to improve health care delivery in resource-constrained environments by coordinating a global community that creates a robust, scalable, user driven, open source medical records system platform. From a different perspective, OpenMRS is also a software platform and a reference application which enables design of a customized medical records system. One more related learning point was that there was an on-going undertaking to incorporate a non-profit organization that would facilitate a more proactive pursuit of the community's mission.

In general there was a sense that for a health information systems initiative like OpenMRS, maintaining a balance between meeting health care delivery and software evolution objectives is paramount. Some nice photos of the meeting can be found here as posted by John Wesonga

Local content grants: Government information portal awards to firms first

2010-09-04T23:26:00.002+03:00

This week there was much buzz about the Kenya 2009 census results, the on-going contest among our mobile networks, and other developments in the Kenyan online content space. What may have passed some of us in the midst of the noise is the announcement of one category of winners for the first round of Local Content and Software Applications Grant. As earlier mentioned on this blog, the initial processes of the grant had a number of useful insights if the ICT Board's post-application survey was to go by.

Applicants for the grant in the government information portal / firms category were announced on 31st August 2010. In this category, seven proposals were chosen from a list of 166 proposals by firms according to the ICT Board's press statement. The seven proposals were

Octopus Solutions Limited - HIV and AIDS in the workplace e-Learing Course - To assist implementation of the HIV and AIDS work place policy among civil servants
Infotrack Strategic Solutions Ltd - Teacher's Portal - Linking Kenyan teachers with their employer (The Teachers Service Commission)
iBid Labs - Kenya Online Museum - Multimedia documentation of Kenya's rich history
Foundation Support Services (FSS) Ltd - IVR Tax Filing Solution - A multilingual platform for Kenyans to file tax returns based on Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology
BTI Millman Company Ltd - eMazingira Software Application - Crowd sourcing application for documenting and collecting information on environmental degradation and abuse using the Ushahidi platform
RiverCross Technologies Ltd - EDUWEB- To create a comprehensive list and interactive map of all education institutions in Kenya
JBA Advertising Co Ltd - Lost and Found Project - To assist Kenyans to find their lost official documents such as national ID cards

Needless to say, successful implementation of the above proposals alone is bound to make a huge impact to Kenyans, solving some of their most basic problems. The proposed projects also have potential for fostering a productive online culture and the growth of our knowledge economy.

It is noteworthy that the ICT board did not announce winners for the other grant categories a per the schedule earlier promised. The missed target is definitely a disappointment for many stakeholders watching - in Kenya any unexpected / unexplained delays in such a process can result in all sorts of conspiracy theories. Nevertheless the board was kind enough to make public more finer details about the remaining categories and the number of applicants as follows :-

Category A: Individuals - Private Sector Digital Content and Software Applications Grants - 133 applicants
Category B: Firms - Private Sector Digital Content and Software Applications Grants - 256 applicants
Category C: Individuals - Government Information Portal - 112 applicants

The board went further to promise announcement of the successful grantees for remaining categories on 28th September 2010. With the earlier missed targets for announcement of evaluation results, it remains doubtful that the new target can be achieved. The doubt remains considering that the first category results announced so far cover barely a quarter of the entire round's applications.

Videos related to the ICT board's announcement at the Serena Hotel can be found here

Insights from the Local Content (Tandaa) Grant Application Process

2010-08-11T21:26:00.011+03:00

Today morning the Kenya ICT Board through its Tandaa Kenya newsletter shared the results of a survey it administered on its grants application process. The survey was administered to applicants of the Local digital Content Grant a day after the proposal application deadline expired. Some highlights of the results were shared through the newsletter and also mentioned in Moses Kemibaro's blog including the following :-

Barely 15% of lead contacts for applicants were female < Affirmative action needed?
77.9% of those who participated were satisfied with the grant application process (more than half of these were very satisfied) < Confirmation of sentiments in my earlier post
20% of those who participated had attended a Tandaa Symposium < More effort might be required to interest more professionals and entrepreneurs in the Kenya ICT Board activities
369 (55%) of the 667 completed applications were made on the last day. < Explanation attempted in my earlier post

Since data analysis is a daily routine for me, I shall attempt a closer look at other statistics from the survey for some more insights. Hopefully this helps for those of us with some curious minds

1) The main channels through which applicants learnt about the grant were the newspaper advertisement (40.3%) and the ICT board website (24.7%).

The mainstream print media seems to remain the most effective way to mobilize participation of the local Tech. fraternity. The apparent popularity of the ICT board's website is welcome as the board grows its reliability and relevance to the Kenyan knowledge economy. The rather dismal performance of the morning shows in this aspect (Nation TV - 4.3% and Citizen TV - 2.1%) appears to indicate the low effectiveness of TV shows aired during 'odd' morning hours.

2) Only 677 (31%) of the attempted 2,154 applications were completed. Further 139 (a meager 9%) of the those who did not complete the application process participated in the evaluation survey. Most of the 139 survey participants stated that they were unable to complete their applications because they did not have supporting documents (43.2%) or they simply run out of time (42.0%)

It appears that time constraints were a significant factor contributing to the the low rate of completed applications. It might have been interesting to see if those who were unable to complete their applications for lack of supporting documents would have gone ahead to complete their applications - given more time to 'secure' the documents. This is also not to say that our last minute culture mentioned in my earlier post would not defeat the purpose us such a deadline extension.

3) Of the 456 participating respondents, 413(90.5%) welcomed the offer by the ICT board to share their proposal information with venture capitalists and other funding agencies. However when further asked to state which specific aspects of their proposals they were free to share, a much lesser portion of 34.4% was willing to have their bugdets shared. Further, slightly less than a third 33.2% of the respondents were free to have their proposed work plans shared. Participants were otherwise generally free to have their proposal title - 70.2%, contact information - 85.7% and overall goals and objectives - 70.7% shared.

This is indicative of changing attitudes among Kenyan 'TechPreneurs'. There appears to be changing perceptions to on the idea of innovation and intellectual property rights. indeed it appears the Kenyan ICT fraternity is moving away from a tendency to sit on their unshared, unimplemented ideas for lack of resources to implement them while fearing that 'someone will steal their idea'. The results also appear to indicate that would be Kenyan innovators are generally trusting of the ICT board.

The fact that few respondents were willing to have their work plans shared is indicative of how confident the applicants were with the finer detail's on their proposals. The applicants might have thought they had more room for improvement to their budgets and work plans hence the hesitation to allow sharing with potential financiers before further tweaking and customization. It is also likely that the applicants simply wished to more easily retain their options for increasing their scope of activities and budgets beyond the Tandaa grant limitations.

Local Content Grants - Signs of a good start by the ICT Board

2010-07-23T08:04:00.004+03:00

Many Kenyan techies did not have a very normal weekend of 17th to 18th July 2010. For the simple reason that the deadline for submitting applications for the 'tandaa' grants was the Monday following (19th July). They had to do last minute write ups and touch ups on their local content grant proposals. Of course there had been a whole month or so to prepare and submit the proposals comfortably. Needless to say our last minute action culture did not excuse even some of the most organized amongt us. According to the ICT board, of 1,800 applicants, 667 successfully completed the application process. Indeed it is likely that many of the 1100 or so proposals that were not completed were merely time barred.

Aside from our 'nice' culture, it may not be too early to give the Kenya ICT board a pat on the back for some noticeable milestones they have achieved with the first round of the local digital content grant financed by one of Kenya's many World Bank loans. Several characteristics of the ICT board process pleasantly distinguishes it from the other local grant management programs.

1. Online Proposal Application

Many government grant programs (eg. in HIV&AIDS grants) involve a tedious process of preparing and submitting physical documents. More often than not 3 or 5 copies of the same document are required. The ICT board's application process has done well in demonstrating that this does not have to be the case. The 'tandaa' application was through a fairly straight forward online form. The form questions were designed to encourage applicants to be straight and to the point in responding to questions using word count limits. The board went further to present a sample grant application and guidelines which were rather useful. A dump of the complete application information that was provided by the system including an application code and was rather useful.

Many people would easily say, and stereotypically so, that such an online application process is only possible where the targeted applicants are IT and internet savvy. My suggestion is that such stereotypes will end in the near future as more and more Kenyans get assimilated into the web culture. It is worth noting that the very reasoning behind the local content grant is to recruit more Kenyans into an online knowledge society by generating more online content and applications they can relate to.

2. FAQs and Answers

I was impressed by the thought of not only holding pre-application regional workshops in Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret and Nairobi to educate Kenyans on the grant but going ahead to post the questions frequently asked about the grant on the ICT board website. It would look like a very basic thing to do to many people but it did make a difference especially for those who could not attend the regional workshops - more so for those who needed some last minute clarifications.

3. Application closure feedback and survey

One more impressive thing was that the board provided feedback to proposal applicants a day following the deadline. The feedback included a mention of how many proposals had been attempted (1800) and how many were successfully concluded (667). The feedback email provided a further reminder that the proposals would be reviewed and results communicated in three weeks. Even more impressive was the fact that along with the email feedback, the board administered a 9 question survey on the application process experience to the applicants. One of the survey questions was whether the applicants wished to have their proposals availed to venture capital firms and other funding agencies. In view of the observation that only about 40 of the 667 proposals would be funded in the first grant cycle, the ICT board came out as proactive with the intention of facilitating financing beyond the grant.

Future expectations

Some friends from outside our small economy might wonder why I am so impressed by the above little successes. It might help them to note that such little efficiencies do not happen every day in our government systems and they are indeed noteworthy. On a continued note of pessimism, we should look forward to the ICT board achieving more successes in this first cycle such as

Stick to the deadline for completion of proposal evaluation and formal communication on results (15th August) while providing a sense of objectivity and fairness in the overall grant award.
Publish analysis of the 9 question application closure survey for more insights on the general perceptions, feelings and experiences of the applications - (might provide useful insights to future applicants)
Publish the list of successful and unsuccessful grants promptly after proposal evaluation - at least on the board's website
Good luck in monitoring project execution by successful applicants for enhanced accountability and impact to the local digital content industry.

On a more trivial but perhaps important note, it might help for more specific timelines to be communicated for application deadlines in future. Stating that the application deadline was 19th July 2010 does not give enough guidance as to whether applications should have been submitted before 00.00hrs 19th, 00.00hrs 20th, or close of business 19th July - typically 17.00hrs.

Lets look forward to more 'little' successes from the ICT board - hoping other grant making institutions will follow the good examples.

M-KESHO's subtle hints on the future of Safaricom

2010-06-02T04:00:00.004+03:00

M-KESHO, the newly launched financial services product is yet another demonstration of how Safaricom is constantly consolidating its gains in the country while exploring new business frontiers. The financial product appears to be a direct derivative of M-PESA's data warehousing essentials. There is definitely a reason Safaricom and Equity Bank are betting on M-KESHO - that of building on past successes and an understanding of the peculiar Kenyan market place.

Despite the welcome innovative moves by the pair, I must say that in my humble estimation the M-KESHO product might succeed but not so much beyond Equity Banks earlier attempt at mobile banking (Eazzy 24/7). I stand corrected but although M-PESA succedes to foster a culture of saving among the unbanked, it may be too early to stretch it in search of interest revenues through a financial credit service - which apparently is the differentiating feature of the M-KESHO product from other mobile banking products.

The close coupling with Equity Bank's banking services might undermine any intentions of M-KESHO being the convenience product like M-PESA that die hard Barclays, KCB and other larger bank's customers would quickly embrace. It is difficult to guess how much strategic weight MJ and troops are placing on the Equity Bank partnership. Certainly though, in the partnership comes a subtle hint that Safaricom will not forever extend their business empire with derivatives of its successful products alone.

Seemingly there is a limit to how far a large company in Kenya can pursue an aggressive product diversification strategy before having to 'sleep' with its other would-be serious competitors. Such a limit would then appear as the beginning of hope for companies competing with Safaricom in any of the sectors it has ventured into.

Hope for Safaricom's Competition

2010-06-02T03:19:00.006+03:00

Much has been written about Safaricom's success in Kenya. From voice, to sms revenues, to money transfer and data services, safaricom has clearly demonstrated the power of leveraging on traditional revenue streams to generate new value propositions. Michael Joseph and his troops are successfully integrating their business empire with the larger Kenyan economy. So far this has the obvious result of apparently sustained competitiveness for Safaricom.

Safaricom's new partnership with Equity Bank whose EAZZY 24/7 service was at some point pre-positioned as a serious competitor to the M-PESA service speaks volumes. Seemingly there is a limit to how far a large company in Kenya can pursue an aggressive product diversification strategy before having to 'sleep' with its other would-be serious competitors. Such a limit would then appear as the beginning of hope for companies competing with Safaricom in any of the sectors it has ventured into.

Indeed, Safaricom's growth remains as dependent on voice business - the cash cow - as it was two years ago if its financial report for 2009 is to go by. The competition therefor still has a chance to rival Safaricom in the money transfer, data and even voice revenue streams. The time is ticking though as MJ and troops are not anywhere near complacent with their product diversification efforts - which may still work for a little longer.

The hope for Safaricom's competitors lies in its continued inability to expand outside the Kenyan economy. Although Safaricom has become the dominant player in Kenya where the all important technology driven services are being discussed, sustainability of its growth remains questionable unless it expands beyond Kenya's borders. Regional expansion would assist the company to consolidate its successes across a wider market space.

Indeed the achille's heel for Safaricom as a largely Kenyan entity will continue to be its inability to expand regionally and globally. Such expansion for the company is seriously curtailed by virtue of Vodaphone - its major shareholder - being already out there as a competing global player. This constraint is apparent in the fact that even the most modest ambition to expand Safaricom's M-PESA service into Tanzania is not possible since Vodaphone has already rolled out the same service there - with the same brand name through Vodacom Tanzania.

In my view Zain, AccessKenya, OboPay and other would be Safaricom competitors need to only drop in some killer innovation and some incredible value propositions for the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) market in Kenya to secure the all important critical mass that they hopelessly lack. Then they can use the same product diversification and vertical integration strategies that Safaricom has applied to easily catch up and meaningfully compete.

Safaricom therefore needs to steer away from the trap to confine its success to the Kenyan economy if it is to sustain its growth and remain competitive.

M-PESA Fraud - Agents Beware!

2010-02-01T20:07:00.005+03:00

Tricksters and dishonest people have always existed in our midst. It is definitely naive to imagine that our new techno-savvy way of life is an exception to the age old social patterns. This afternoon, an M-PESA agent was a victim of a new line of M-PESA fraud.

Here goes the story; this is factual and occurred on February 1st 2010 in a peri-urban setting about 24 kilometres from the Nairobi City Centre

About 2.00PM, a lady and a gentleman who looked to be in their mid twenties visited an M-PESA outlet, claiming to be Safaricom supervisors. The two wore valid looking M-PESA badges and even carried M-PESA promotional material for the outlet. The two inspected the outlet’s log books then left. Note: It is normal for Safaricom to send supervisors to routinely inspect various parameters on operations of M-PESA outlets. The supervisors usually wear Safaricom badges and often take with them M-PESA promotional material to the outlets
About 20 minutes after the purported supervisors left, an old looking man estimated to be at his late 50s or early 60s came to the same outlet requesting to withdraw Ksh.35,000. The man was allowed to withdraw the desired Ksh 35,000 and went ahead to initiate the withdrawal from his phone – as is the normal procedure.
Shortly after, the outlet attendants received an SMS purporting to record and authenticate the old man’s withdrawal transaction. The SMS received by the attendant had a valid looking M-PESA transaction number and the old man’s purported names which were verified against an original national ID which he presented.
The M-PESA attendant, convinced about the validity of the transaction (just like hundreds of others processed daily) gave the old man an initial Ksh. 30,000 and was reaching out for the remaining Ksh. 5,000. Before the exta amount could be retrieved, the old man calmly signed the outlet transaction and walked away saying he would come for the remainder later.
The M-PESA attendant continued with the next customer, expecting their float to have increased by Ksh. 35,000 as a result of the withdrawal. The expected float was then not reflected in the valid M-PESA SMS after the next customer’s transaction – raising a red flag to the M-PESA attendant.
The M-PESA attendant shortly after called 234 – Safaricom’s M-PESA service line for clarification and the service support person on the other end reported that the transaction withdrawing Ksh. 35,000 was not reflected in the M-PESA system
Alarmed at the Safaricom claim, the M-PESA attendant frantically attempted to call out for the old man who had disappeared by then without a trace.
Late in the afternoon, the M-PESA agent went to the police station to report the incident. The police officers took initial details and promised to visit the outlet the following day for further investigations.

A number of discrepancies have since been highlighted on the fake M-PESA SMS which is copied and pasted below

‘P47DT685 confirmed on 01/2/2010 at 2.20PM Give Ksh 35,000 to DANIEL MAINA New M-PESA balance is Kh 42,049 Sender:MPESA +254771831462’

I shall leave the analysis of the text and the resulting fraud to the reader for now.

Note that according to the Safaricom M-PESA support person, the M-PESA agent only has to count their loss as no indemnity is payable to the agent for their predicament. When the known Safaricom / M-PESA representative for the affected region was contacted they disowned ‘supervisory visit’ by the lady and gentleman 20 minutes before the 'withdrawal' was requested. I wonder how many more M-PESA agents have fallen pryy to this new M-PESA trickery.

Save Africa from monopolistic content vendors

2010-01-01T18:21:00.003+03:00

The arrival in 2009 of international submarine fibre optic data links to East Africa is anticipated to catalyse a digital revolution in the region. For a long time access to any international digital content has been expensively dependent on satellite solution providers. With the drastic fall of internet bandwith costs already implemented by some of the terrestrial digital infrastructure providers like KDN, Kenyans and East Africans in general are in for completely overhauled digital content industry.

So significant was the anticipated change in content delivery that the Kenya ICT Board and individuals like Dr. Bitange Ndemo were aggressively evangelizing Kenyan youth and entrepreneurs to indulge en masse in the digital content generation industry. The noble campaign to make Kenyans bridge their international content exchange deficit may also have had a side effect of forgetting to address some of the long standing content importation challenges. A majority of Kenyans continue to pay dearly for their expensive content importation habits such as fanatically following the English Premier League (EPL).

English Premier League matches appear to be only available through the traditional satellite TV channel currently a monopoly of the South African Multichoice DSTV. So valuable is the football and sports to Kenyans that many of us pay USD 73 per month to pay for the appropriate DSTV package. The monthly rate is interestingly in dollars or at a Multichoice.za prescribed Ksh/dollar rate of Ksh 78. For now I need not go into the tribulations that Kenyans have to persevere, inflicted by DSTV’s monopolistic tendencies – that’s for another day. Needless to say, a good number of Kenyans live on less than USD 30 a month.

I presume subscriptions to international digital content delivered through satellite are exorbitantly priced, inevitably because of the cost of maintaining the expensive satellite links. I shall also presume that the same digital content services can be delivered via our new international optic fibre gateways. I should finally be allowed to assume that it is time for Kenyans to seek delivery of ‘essential’ international content such as live English premier league games through the new fibre optic gateways. The issue of limits in bandwidth capacity and redundancy should not be an issue any more, having SEACOM and TEAMS already live in 2009 and EASSY becoming live in mid 2010.

I shall begin my appeals for 2010 by urging Kenyans to actively participate in leveraging our own football content (away from the current troubled state). I am also appealing to the ICT ministry to proactively pursue and support the use of the expensively acquired international optic fibre links to deliver the all important EPL content to Kenyans. Lastly I am appealing to the EPL itself to desist from perpetuating tendencies of monopolistic multinationals; for instance selling 100% broadcast rights to a singular entity.

semeni - Kenya's nifty group SMS service repackaged

2009-12-28T16:47:00.006+03:00

Aside from the unending debate of the M-PESA success in Kenya, it is interesting to note that there are other SMS based services that have been maturing into being equally innovative and relevant to the peculiar people of Kenya. I have been thinking through semeni; the group SMS service developed by mobile planet and perhaps in conjunction with 'our Safaricom'. My chama (investment group) has used the service for at least two years now and I think it is a very convenient and practical service. Readers comments on my previous post on M-PESA ownership pointed at convenience to the populace being the significant factor for M-PESA's success. I should say then that if convenience were the only factor for the phenomenal success, then semeni (or 184 as known within my chama) should be equally successful in a few more months or years from now.

The service allows users to broadcast an SMS text to multiple selected friends, family members, co-workers and so on within the Safaricom network for only 10/- per broadcast. The same should be possible as standard features of some mobile phone handsets which an individual can set up on their own phone. Semeni takes the otherwise basic feature further by making it platform (handset) indipendent to begin with - embracing the now hype cloud computing concept. The service then goes ahead to offer individuals a relatively simple and common interface to create, modify and delete groups. Administrative features include inviting new members and 'transferring leadership'. For individual members, features include creating their nick names specific to each group they belong to, going offline - to stop receiving group messages temporarily, and voluntarily leaving a group. The service goes ahead to act as an archive of messages sent through the group - a cool feature for those of us who are perpetually pruning the inbox of our low capacity handsets.

What makes this service a little more ready for the masses as 2009 comes to a close is the added combination of both an SMS and a web based user interface. The group and individual membership management features are accessible through either the SMS or the Web based mode. The repackaged service also scales up to allow individual membership of more than one group by adding a extra digit after the 184 code. The new groups are coded 184X (where X is 1-9,0) to uniquely identify a maximum of 10 groups that an individual can theoritically belong to. As such I could have the number 1841 assigned to my estate 'jirani mwema' group, 1842 to my Bible study group, 1843 to my chama, 1844 to my sibblings and so on.

Perhaps it is not the basic feature of broadcasting SMS texts to selected groups of friends and family members at reduced costs that makes semeni a ground breaking service for Kenyans. It is rather the potential that such a service carries of competing at the same level as facebook, twitter and other social network services heavily used in Kenya. As a social media platform, semeni has this unique advantage of starting from the trusted, established and known social networks inherent in the existing social patterns of Kenyans. It will definitely not surprise many to have semeni offer more social media-like services on its web based interface. The service' apparent approach of offerring a simple and deliberately reduced feature set might be a plus if the phenomenal growth of twitter with its reduced feature set is to go by.

On the downside the service currently appears to be one more item in Safaricom's arsenal to indefinitely lock its 14 million plus subscribers within its arguably expensive network. The service also has yet to allow its users to send messages for free or at normal network rates from its web-based platform. Of greater concern is that the service seems not to be beneffitting much from Safaricom's phenomenal marketting bugdet as yet.

The semeni support center would be a good place to start for those who want to know more about how the service works.