Afropreneur: Africa's business and technology blog

• Facing and addressing the challenges as an SME in Kenya

  Posted: January 25, 2008, 3:47 pm

  The recent political and social skirmishes in Kenya have added an extra layer of challenges to the Kenyan business community, the SME sector being one of the worst affected. The reason I say this is unlike big business that have cash reserves that help them weather the storm, the SME sector commonly operates on working capital and day-to-day cash, the reserve that is there is primarily used to pay bills and source for new business. Many of the plans including for 2008 were based on positive growth in certain key sectors, Multiple Choices for instance was betting on the BPO sector that was showing some impressive growth as well the SME sector which would need a web presence and as such provide as with business, but this plans have been adversely affected to the point that some businesses are thinking twice about keeping their doors open.

  So what next for SME's in Kenya? I think the first thing they need to do is come together to highlight the issues that they are facing and dialogue about possible solutions to these problems. I've found that when people come together under a common interest, in this case business survival, many "giant" problems seem small. It is with stakeholders that ideas are generated, emotions expressed and eventually solutions implemented.

  The financial sector should also be brought in to assist the SME's by coming up with financial rescue packages that can alleviate the problem while providing a solid foundation for growth. It must be pointed that the financial sector is also affected by the situation in Kenya and as such any assistance they give needs to place them on a positive footing. The financial rescue package must not be seen as a long term crutch, but rather as a short term remedy to a long term problem that will still need to be addressed.

  Moving forward the SME sector needs to adequately strengthen itself and come up with a solid solutions that can be implemented when the business environment has been adversely affected. I hope that in the next weeks or months, like minded people in this sector will come together and help each other to move forward.

• A case for free software in schools

  Posted: January 20, 2008, 3:23 pm

  I stumbled upon this interesting article that makes the case for free software in schools, which I thought I'd share:

  Why schools should exclusively use free software

  There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers—with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what the software user wants it to do. Free software also gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life. These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone.

  But there are special reasons that apply to schools. They are the subject of this article.

  First, free software can save the schools money. Even in the richest countries, schools are short of money. Free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software, so the school system can make copies for all the computers they have. In poor countries, this can help close the digital divide.

  This obvious reason, while important, is rather shallow. And proprietary software developers can eliminate this disadvantage by donating copies to the schools. (Watch out!—a school that accepts this offer may have to pay for future upgrades.) So let's look at the deeper reasons.

  School should teach students ways of life that will benefit society as a whole. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will use free software after they graduate. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated (and gouged) by megacorporations. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes: to get children addicted (1). They will not give discounts to these students once they grow up and graduate.

  Free software permits students to learn how software works. When students reach their teens, some of them want to learn everything there is to know about their computer system and its software. That is the age when people who will be good programmers should learn it. To learn to write software well, students need to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. They will be intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.

  Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!” Free software encourages everyone to learn. The free software community rejects the “priesthood of technology”, which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know. Schools that use free software will enable gifted programming students to advance.

  The next reason for using free software in schools is on an even deeper level. We expect schools to teach students basic facts, and useful skills, but that is not their whole job. The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors—to cooperate with others who need their help. In the area of computers, this means teaching them to share software. Elementary schools, above all, should tell their pupils, “If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other children.” Of course, the school must practice what it preaches: all the software installed by the school should be available for students to copy, take home, and redistribute further.

  Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson. It also teaches students the role model of public service rather than that of tycoons. All levels of school should use free software.

  Original Article: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/schools.html 

   

• ICTKenya: Peupe powers a key website

  Posted: January 19, 2008, 7:26 pm

  ICTKenya is the most recent recipient of a Peupe, which to me is very awesome considering the humble beginnings of Peupe. ICTKenya is meant to be the platform for the ICT community to come together and push out a positive message at this time of crisis which I talked about here, a place where our voices as an industry can be heard. It's an initiative of several key industry players including Multiple Choices, and one that I'm proud to be associated with.

  ICTKenya is running on FreeBSD with Mongrel Cluster and Apache 2.2 as the proxy.It still needs some work in terms of look and feel plus a few bugs but its getting there.

• $3 million dollars for rails hosting

  Posted: January 11, 2008, 7:04 pm

  In one of the most significant shows of confidence in Ruby on Rails, Engine Yard a Ruby on Rails web hosting company has received $3 million in funding from a venture capitalist. Engine Yard is the brain child of Ezra Zygmuntowicz of BrainSplat, a very informative ruby/ruby on rails blog. Ezra's blog has very good information especially on the matter of deploying and scaling rails applications.

  This is probably the most positive reaffirmation of Rails as framework that has potential despite the problems it has in turns of scaling and speed. Lets hope that this is the first of many such investments in the framework. 

• Python in 10 days

  Posted: January 10, 2008, 1:50 pm

  During the 10 or so days of chaos it presented me with an opportunity to go through my Python ebook and dig into the language. I've always had a negative perception coupled with a weird fascination with python, I think because on one had it evokes images of heavily indented and lack of delimited code , while on the other hand it evokes an image of stability, feature rich, robustness and strong community support (Google swears by python). Armed with my ebook and a lot of time on my hands I started studying (I've read the ebook before the language while running some practise scripts, by day ten I had grasped a good understanding of the language and was comfortable writing scripts and performing common operations such as file & directory access, regular expressions among others.

  Armed with the basics my intimate relationship Python has began :) lets see where this relationship will take me. 

• Enhanced Google Maps for East Africa

  Posted: January 10, 2008, 1:24 pm

  On tuesday I had the rare opportunity courtesy of Chris Kiagiri, Technical Lead at Google Kenya to have a sneak peek at the upcoming enhanced google mpas for east africa and let me say it was truly awesome. The amount of detail in this new version is quite amazing, a quick look at the nairobi map goes as far down as streets, buildings (building name and icon) and even adds information to indicate if the street is one way or two way. The enhanced maps currently cover major cities and towns in East Africa including Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, and Dar es Salaam.

   Another interesting service I happened to see was the Location based service that integrates google maps with Safaricom to show you where you are on the map based on your mobile phone. I think this service is quite promising and there are different services such map direction services, amenity location services that can leverage this technology.

  I mentioned in an earlier post here that with this new map the mashup wars can finally begin, well the starting shot has been fired, may the best man or woman win.

• ICT Peace Initiative

  Posted: January 10, 2008, 1:08 pm

  On monday I had the opportunity to be part of a discussion that was convened by ICT leaders, in attendance were 4 key players in the ICT industry. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss how the ICt community can use their infrastructure to push out a positive message about Kenya at a time when all the messages being broadcasted are negative. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of negative things that have happened over the course of 2 weeks but on theother end a lot of positive actions and steps are being taken to counter the negative. The amount of goodwill being shown by Kenyans of all origins has been amazing, the peace and healing initiatives being spearheaded by individuals and organisations are going a long way towards heling the country move in the right direction. Unfortunately none of this is being communicated by the main stream media, the foreign media being the main culprits, in fact one major british media house keeps on showing the same clip of chaos that occured over a week ago despite the fact that the violence has been subdued.

  I don't expect the international press to bend their backs to portray a positive message, after all bad news sells, and so the responsibility is on us as Kenyans to ensure that we show the healing and that the country is working past this. The social, political and economic message must be addressed from a positive angle, schools are reopening and students from all tribes will sit next to each other learning and sharing, this my friend is Kenya healing.

  I appeal to all my Kenyan brothers and sisters especially those in the ICT industry to embrace a positive message and attitude, it's the first step in moving past our mistakes.  

• A major rails rant

  Posted: January 2, 2008, 2:59 pm

  For those of you who are Ruby/Ruby on Rails developers, you must be familiar with Zed Shaw the creator of the awesome Mongrel Server, a work of genius I must say. Well with his legendary status in the Ruby community his decided to post a major rant on his blog, please be warned that this rant has obscene language.

  Check it out here: Rails is a ghetto 

   

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes