Catch’em while they are young

Akirachix and The Kuyu Project have embarked on a digital camp for a few girls from Precious Blood High School Riruta. The training focuses on using digital technology and social media tools to effect social change.

Wangechi, Ivy and Faith in the mLab

Precious Blood High School is one of the top performing girls’ high schools in Kenya. Akirachix had earlier visited Precious Blood to give a motivational talk and to encourage the girls to pursue careers in tech.

The team of 10 girls aim to create a social media platform that will facilitate community service efforts among their peers – an idea they conceptualized on their own. The team members are: Wangechi Mwangi,¬†Cynthia Gathaara ¬†Ivy Lang’at, Joy Warimah, Faith Nyakundi, Kasyoka Mutunga, Brenda Wanja, Naomi Muthama, Julie Waithaka and Mary Njoki.

The brilliant team

The Kuyu project will facilitate the girls’ training while Akirachix will hand hold the girls through the development phase and use the Akirachix network to bring their dream into a reality.

Akirachix objectives are networking, mentorship and training. To actively implement mentorship Akirachix plans to spread its wings to high schools to mentor girls and participate in their career days. This is aimed at opening their minds to consider tech as a career or at least think of ways that Tech can improve their day to day lives. This digital camp initiative is one way we are implementing mentorship and training.

The Kuyu Project on the other hand aims to trains African youth to fully utilize social media and other digital tools to effect social change in their communities and to achieve their goals and objectives. We believe this fuels the dreams and aspirations of these young minds which might one day lead to the innovations and technologically driven solutions that will change Africa and the world.

The key to successful implementation of technology in our society and effectively achieving our hope of becoming a technology powerhouse in not only Africa but the world involves growing a human resource base that can facilitate tech development. One of the ways of getting the best and the brightest in to the field of technology is to expose them early to technology and its possibilities. Through this endeavour, Akirachix and The Kuyu Project are equipping the next generation of social and tech innovators.

Google’s Joe Mucheru at the iHub

Joe Mucheru visited iHub on Friday evening for a Fireside Chat. If you passed him on the street, you would have no idea that the youthful unassuming man is the African regional lead of one of the most prolific companies on earth. Joe has had a lot of success pioneering Google’s presence in Africa for the last four years. However, the friendly setting of the Fireside chat allowed him to tell the fascinating backstory of his life which was perhaps more appropriate for the audience of young technology enthusiasts at the iHub.

Joe started off by telling us that he was born near Limuru and was in boarding school from about the age of nine. He went to Lenana High School, and afterwards studied Economics and Computer Science at City University of London.  He smilingly told us that after a period of working in the UK, he wondered what exactly he was doing there in a land where his ears would freeze for half the year, and  that’s when decided to come back home.

Joe Mucheru doesn’t know the meaning of the word lazy. He set up his own business, Information Retrieval Services, which was brought down by an unfortunate theft of his hardware and equipment. He then went to work developing a website for a company at a time when most people in Kenya had no idea what the internet was. Mucheru styles himself as one of the first webmasters in Kenya. He asked his employer to match what he’d been making in the UK, Ksh. 200,000 per month, but his employer laughed and offered him Ksh20,000, because after all, this “internet web thing” wasn’t that big of a deal. Joe laughed as he recalled that he had just signed an apartment lease for Ksh. 21,000 per month, and realized that he’d have to get smart to survive. He negotiated a deal where he would earn 60-70% of any deal that would come in as a result of his website. His employer agreed, but Joe had the last laugh when several months later, he was pulling in Ksh. 150,000 per month through the new work resulting from his site and his employer pleaded a renegotiation of a flat salary.

A few years down the line, Joe founded Wananchi Online, together with Njeri Rionge, with the goal of bringing internet to the common Kenyan. Joe spoke about his vision to provide home internet access for Ksh. 1000 a month an idea that widely derided, but because of his personality and drive, Wananchi found an Angel investor that committed $500,000 to this dream. The rest is history. Throughout his career and through his company Joe has always been a passionate advocate of democratizing the internet in Kenya and lowering barriers to access, especially through improvement of key infrastructure, resulting in the recent underwater internet fiber optic cable.

Joe spoke about the key principles of his success. Create a solid plan, and then execute blindly. When Google was simultaneously courting him and testing him with over 17 interviews, he got a demonstration of one of Google’s principles – invest a lot in making sure you hire the right people. People that are flexible, and can change direction with the company. Another principle Joe learned from Google was to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. He was afforded the freedom to take a solid idea and run with it.

Joe ended on a note that seemed out of place for a technology talk but tied in to his committed, dive-in approach to life and work. “Guard your health,” he told the iHub audieance. “You can’t work when you’re unwell.”

Post by Maria Langat of http://africatech.wordpress.com

Apps4Africa Competition

Hello AkiraChix,

Here is yet another great opportunity for all of you.

The Apps4Africa competition, brought to us by the United States Department of State,*iHub_,Appfrica Labs and Social Development Network (SODNET),was recently launched at the iHub Nairobi. This regional competition is one that celebrates the idea that the energy, optimism and technical acumen of East Africa’s technology community can help change the way we solve big social problems, amplify the voice of marginalized communities, and lower the barriers to public participation in the region. Generally, the aim of this competition is to bridge the very wide gap between the civic society and developers out there.

The competition runs from 1st July to 31st August. Local developers are challenged to develop applications that will address challenges within the community, and East Africa in general. Participants stand to win fantastic prizes in the form of cash, gadgets, and aslo the chance to meet the top-notch judges in an awards ceremony in September.

AkiraChix would like to encourage all you developers out there to PARTICIPATE, and EVANGELISE. Spread the word about this competition and make a positive impact towards making life better for our society . Sign up as an developer, or a mentor.

For more information, visit the Apps4Africa website.

Who said we can’t change the world?

I read an article this morning about¬† Oprah’s Angel Network, a network that is dedicated to a better tomorrow.

One of their activities that caught both my heart and eyes is, the O Ambassadors trip to Kenya. This story not only brought tears to my eyes but also made me  think of what ordinary Kenyans can do to make our country a better place for our children.

12 teenagers from this network head to Amboseli(hope am correct about the location) to build a school with their own hands within three weeks.Shocked? So was I. But it is real and it happened here,in Kenya.The only tools they had were a 30 minutes construction lesson and their determination to make a difference in the world.

Haley says,I quote from Oprah’s website :“We were 12 kids, and we were supposed to build from scratch with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows? I literally said, ‘This is a joke.’” Only time and everybody’s determiation proved Haley wrong.

The local community was not left behind as they worked hand in hand with the ambassadors;laying bricks and seeing those walls rise.

For Ambassadors to help the community,they had to put themselves in the locals shoes(am sure they got pricked by thorns more than once..) and help in the daily chores:

1.Goat herding.See the video here.

2.Fetching water from river Elerai. I can’t express my mixed emotions here,so you got to see it for yourself(click me).

and….the school building of course!

One of the girls breaks into tears. She couldn’t stand the sight and the smell of horror,the kids drinking dirty water and have no other choice but to drink it.Her confused state of wanting to extend a helping hand to the needy but do not know where to commence.I feel you sister,I feel you! This is the feeling we all get and say “tomorrow I will make a difference in someone’s life!”.Tomorrow comes and all we care about is having our breakfast,dash out and back to our normal lives.

My favorite and the most enlightening part of the story is Haley’s comment,I quote “We are all kids no matter where we’re from, where we grow up. Every single one of us has the same values and innocence about us,There’s no reason for them to be less privileged or different than us.” I believe so too!

My question is,what can you change to make Kenya a suitable place to live in without spending a coin?

More videos:

The Trip of a Lifetime

School Supplies

Home Tour

The New School

Student Teaching

Barcamp Nairobi 2010

Day 1.
Barcamp 2010 kicked of on the 12th of June with more than 600 people in attendance,Barcamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.The meeting kicked of with Erik Hersman of Ushahidi welcoming everyone to the event and laying down the days agenda.

Barcamp Nairobi 2010

To start off the presentation was Mikel Maron of OpenStreatMap ,who gave an insight on activities revolving around Mapping Kibera(some of the AkiraChix and Honorary Akirachix members did some mapping by taking a walk along Ngong rd and mapping the landmarks from Bishop Magua all the way “…..emphasis on all the way” to chinaplace),followed by Geo Tube,Paul kukubo, C.E.O Kenya ICT Board with his talk on Government and transparency.

Second session (Lightning session organized by Judith Owigar) saw presentations from the likes of

• Jepchumba of African Digital art, with¬† an interesting take on using your computer to make beautiful art.
• Judith and Jamila¬† of Akirachix gave a presentation on the whole idea behind Akirachix.
• Sajid Thomas on Geography and how to find your significant other using G.I.S mapping.Which is quite worrying to some of us
• Crystal Kigoni on Voices of Africa organization, and some of their current projects, such as the Internet, Rural Internet Kiosks, with a 512Mb bandwidth capacity.
• Erica Hagen of open Street Map, on the new project they‚Äôre working on, involving citizen Journalism.
• Stefan Magdalinski of Mocality on the business of Business Directories in Africa.
• Karim Kanji the Techvibes blogger also gave a session on blogging
• Kevin Isaac and Brian Okello of Shika,on how they are motivating the less privileged youth and training them basic IT skills.
• Mike Macharia, C.E.O of SevenSeas talked about the importance of mentorship for young entrepreneurs in businesses,and also illustrated the importance of business training

Jepchumba from African Digital Art

Ruffle session was up with google Nexus 1 phone up for grabs,Tonee Ndungu took the 3 finalist through a series of elimination question,”..the Nexus 1 wasnt coming cheap”,eventually Benjamin Kilonzo from Technobrain proved to be the smarter one by having the highest no of correctly answered questions. He walked away with a Google Nexus phone courtesy of Google.

Erik gave the last talk of the day by giving a brief overview of Ushahidi i.e how it was all started,and what its all about,Barcamp day one was finally over and atendees collected t-shirts on their way out ,while others remained behind chatting and catching up on Argentina vs Nigeria game as pizzas streamed in from Debonairs courtesy of SevenSeas.

Barcamp 2010

Day 2.
Barcamp day 2 which was a half day event saw about 250 guys in attendance,and it kicked of on time with presentations on the morning session from

• Reinner Battenberg from Mountbatten(Mountbatten sponsored the first 25 cappuccino from Pete’s cafe that morning)on building a Drupal site in 20mins you could tell how Reinner was passionate about Drupal he might have even converted a few of us from WordPress to Drupal
• John Karanja from whive.com on 9 colloquial languages in Kenya.
• Jamila Abass,Linda Kamau and Judith Owigar on Akirachix(Geek girls in Nairobi) what its all about and what the group intends to do,its so happens that majority of people who attended the Akirachix session were dudes and they are also our biggest supporters .

The attendees took a lunch break after the first session,where pizzas were delivered yet again in plenty thanks to sevenseas,it was back to business after heavy intake of pizzas with:-

• Kaburo of Kenya ICT board on the new $4m grant,apparently its been less than 2 weeks since the grant was announced and already 500+ have sent their applications.the application can be done online
• Mano Marks Geo developer for google on Google Geo API and an overview of what can be done using their API.This session also saw guys enlightend about¬† mapping with the help of the mapping gurus Mikel of OSM,Mano of Google maps and Stefan of Mocality this guys sure know their thing

As the Barcamp came to an end,it is was clear that Barcamp is one of the largest technology events in all of Africa, the crowd stayed on watching the  Serbia vs Ghana on the big screen and everyone left on their own pleasure.

Mikel Maron(arms raised) of OSM,Mano Marks of Google(left),Erik Hersman of ushahidi(right),And Angie of Akirachix passing by

Barcamp Sponsers