bankelele

• The Grid Goes Global

  Posted: September 2, 2010, 8:59 pm by bankelele

  The Grid, a mobile only social network owned by Vodacom, has gone global.
  
  First heard about The Grid when 'Portfolio Manager', Vincent Maher, spoke at Mobile Web in Nairobi earlier this year.
  
  - The Grid is a mashup of instant messaging, content sharing, location based services
  
- They target ads by location gender age time of day. Also they use location based adverts. To use LBA one needs user location, ad server that support this (Google does) and application that adds location. This is good for very small businesses e.g. hairdresser, plumbers, and they can expect to see low volume of impression but a high click though rate

  - Users don’t need to have GPS to use the service
 as the Grid uses aerial photographs and their own maps (not Google maps)

  - 

What is coming next?
- Ambient (mood based) advertising
  
- Desire line anticipation (plot where you will be and advertiser prompts you to buy later when you get there)


  
  The Grid has about two million users in South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania. It rivals MXit, which dominates South Africa, and was launched in Kenya with Vodafone-managed Safaricom in May 2010.

• Rockefeller helps Farmers cope with Climate Change

  Posted: September 2, 2010, 1:44 pm by bankelele

  The Rockefeller Foundation involvement in Africa goes as far back as 1914 and one of their goals is to strengthen food security in sub-Saharan Africa.
  
  Climate change is affecting food security and the current floods in Pakistan attest and African farmers are seeing wild swings in weather, coping with higher temperatures, less dependable rainfall, and experiencing longer droughts. In Kenya, the Rockefeller Foundation estimates that maize production could decline by 30% in the next 20 years.
  
  Africa countries need to recognize their vulnerability to climate change as ½ billion people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, yet some governments are instead selling off buying tracts of productive land to other countries who are themselves investing to enhance their own food security through geographic diversification
  
  The Foundation has thus made agricultural investments improve their productivity of farmers by reducing the risks they face through key innovations including
  
  - Developing new affordable insurance products for small farmers & pastoralists that are indexed to weather; this encourages farmers to increase land & agricultural investment with the knowledge that they may be compensated if weather conditions adverse affect their harvest
  
  pastoralists & their cattle camp in Nairobi's kileleshwa suburb during 2009 drought
  - Funded the World Food Program to develop a software platform to predict most destructive elements; Known as RiskView, it can be customized or every district in every country in Africa and allows governments and aid agencies to when and where a drought will occur.
  - Funded Kencall to implement a national helpline for farmers, staffed by a team of experts to answer farmer question on climate change, seeds, fertilizer, agro-dealer location etc – this will help overcome a challenge many famers don’t try new techniques or seeds because they don’t have enough information to take a risk. The information collected will become a research resource even outside Kenya.
  - Partnered with Kenya-based Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), in a $50 million loan program through Equity Bank’s ‘kilimo biashara’ program in which the Foundation undertook some risk guarantee enabling the Bank lend to small farmers at below market risks who take up other products like fertilizer weather insurance, and use the help line.
  
  read more

• Ship Repair in East Africa

  Posted: September 2, 2010, 1:22 pm by bankelele

  There’s an old company located near the port of Mombasa called the African Marine and General Engineering Company Limited - (AMGECO) which is a dry dock ship repair facility, and one of its kind on the East Coast of Africa.
  
  The company has a long history in East Africa, and has gone through ownership and management changes over several decades, but the core investment is the Lloyd's certified giant facility & dry dock which carries out all manner of ship repairs including steel & metalwork, engine servicing, mechanical, electrical, cabin/woodwork, refrigeration/air conditioning and hull-cleaning among others. They also re-stock ships with provisions like food and water.
  
  pic from their website
  The facility can handle repairs of various ships including cruise liners, military , cargo, tankers and others in its 40 metre wide berth, and currently they are repairing one of the old Kenya Likoni ferries.
  
  The skilled work and scope of repairs is fascinating, and ranges from light repairs of lifeboats to heavy ship re-building in their dry dock - and it makes for an interesting place to visit in Mombasa if you get the chance

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