Rich Kenyans should  help creative youths actualise their ideas

CK Square at the Two Rivers Mall is a truly magnificent monument to the man it is named after, but Chris Kirubi needs to invest in Kenya’s young people next. It is not enough for him to pontificate about entrepreneurship online; he needs to put his money where his keyboard, sorry, mouth is.

He needs to get together with Manu Chandaria, the President and other monied Kenyans to set up a fund to support the next generation of entrepreneurs. Malls, apartment blocks, holiday homes and fast-moving consumer goods are all great, but it is time to support brilliant ideas from young people with audacious dreams to change the world. Many of them will fail, but the few that thrive should more than make up for those that fall by the wayside.

I spoke at the Afrobytes conference in Paris last week, a junction for the African tech industry to interface with the rest of the world, now in its second year. On a panel I moderated, the deputy CEO of Orange, Pierre Louette, announced that the French telecoms giant would invest €50 million (Sh5.8 billion)  in Africa.

Half  the money will be invested indirectly via funds specialising in the digital sector while the other half will be channelled through the newly-created Orange Digital Ventures Africa to fund well-established African startups. I wanted to know from the speakers why African founders still struggle to attract financing for their startups while technology is awash with cash internationally, most notably in Silicon Valley.

I’ve known the answer  since 2011, when I made my first “pilgrimage” to the Bay Area in the American west coast. “Silicon Valley exists because people who have made money here continue to invest in the valley,” someone told me.

Even today, many of those who sell their companies for tidy profits plough some of that money back into the ecosystem. You see the same names that were early investors in standouts like Facebook, Twitter and Uber doing it again and again. They bet on inexperienced youths with baffling visions of the future and when it pays off, they make their money back several times over.

SUCCESS STORIES

Togolese journalist and entrepreneur Claude Grunitzky was a media entrepreneur at the  age of 23. He is of African descent but when he approached the continent’s wealthy people, they all turned him down — 17 in total — until the American investment bank, Goldman Sachs, funded him.

“For a variety of reasons, wealthy Africans have shied away from investing in the media partly for political reasons,” he said on another panel. I countered that rich Africans hadn’t just avoided investing in media but  don’t invest in anything remotely risky in favour of betting and real estate. 

The KCB-supported Lion’s Den TV show is a good boost and launchpad for some entrepreneurs but you can’t dramatise or condense the arduous task of raising financing into just 45 minutes a week. 

South African entrepreneur Vusi Thembekwayo, a judge in his country’s edition of Dragon’s Den, says  most of the investments he made on the show failed. The Kenyan  programme is only in its second edition so it is too early to tell but judge Kris Senanu told me the due diligence required for every investment went far beyond what was aired. 

There have been precious few success stories out of the much-hyped Kenyan Silicon Savannah. There are even fewer well-performing locally grown startups apart from BRCK, M-Kopa Solar, Kopo Kopo, and Branch, all of which have some foreign leadership or investment.

There are plenty of accelerators, hackathons, competitions and buzz but very little substance coming out of the Kenyan technology ecosystem.

That is probably a subjective view but I have followed it closely for almost a decade  and I remain in awe of all the smart people who work in this space. I want more of them to succeed like Julian Kyula with Mode, Mike Macharia with Seven Seas, and Kamal Budhabatti with Craft Silicon.

I want a Mark Zuckerberg to come out of my backyard and build a billion-dollar business that hundreds of millions around the world will use. If a product or solution works in Kenya, it can probably work in the emerging world and that’s several billion people we’re talking about.

None of this can happen unless those with the means are willing to put some of their money into moonshot ideas and help them become unicorns. Your move, DJ CK.

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HUNG PARLIAMENT 

A lesson from British politics

Theresa May is likely going to be remembered as the worst prime minister in Britan’s history.

Even objective journalists are calling her haughty for calling an “unnecessary” election in which she squandered the majority she had in the House of Commons and was forced to enter into a coalition to form a new government. It has left her even more weakened than she was when she announced this snap poll hoping to gain popular support as she goes into the Brexit negotiations.

The intricacies of British politics are too complicated for someone like me to understand but it was baffling to see her call an election within a few weeks then lose and win at the same time. The exit polls turned out to be correct and she ended up with a “hung parliament”, which caused great consternation among the commentariat.

It must be a terrible place to be for the former Home Secretary to be compared to the great Margaret Thatcher and to be found wanting. If she handled this like a proper African president — ahem, Joseph Kabila — she would have avoided this whole mess and gone on her merry way. Or she could have changed the Constitution and ruled forever.

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PAMPERED PUSS 

Cat restaurants the in-thing!

I was just minding my business, walking along the beautiful streets of the small vorthern Dutch city of Groningen when I saw it.

I did a double take because I thought I wasn’t seeing right,or maybe my brain was messing with me. “All you need is coffee, cake and cats. Lots of it,” the sign outside said.

It’s called Kattencafé, Dutch for Cat Café. There were people in there having drinks and petting these ridiculously spoiled cats. The founder is 27-year-old Hielkje Wester, who has a degree in hospitality management and worked an office job for five years.

“During a sunny holiday in Portugal, I read an article about cat café and I was sold in June 2015,” she says on her website. “I resigned from my employer and in February 2016 my dream came true.” Today, 10 shelter cats have found a home there and a quirky business is booming.

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FEEDBACK: On Kenyan men’s misguided idea of masculinity

LARRY, I have a mother, wife and daughter who are my top three friends and pillars. I do everything possible to show that I love and appreciate them. However men and women  will never, be the same. But this does not translate to superiority and inferiority. At the family level, the man is the long-term security grantor as well as provider while the woman deals with the day-to-day home affairs. That’s why you find men talking politics and economic affairs because they  tendency to deal with long-term issues. Women, whether in the corporate world or village, will naturally talk about children, vegetables, clothes, etc. 

Paul

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Larry, congrats on such commendable piece. I agree wth you totally : gone are the days when being macho was the definition of a man. It’s absurd how some ignorant men osay all that crazy stuff about “umama” on the Internet yet are provided for by their wives when they go home. We all know it’s hard for a man to accept being corrected because, well, “We are always right”, so when someone else comes with a contrary opinion, apparently “ako na umama “

Kelvin

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You wrote about people calling you names yet you did the same, or even worse. Some things deserve no response because at the moment, people are thinking politics and from your answers, you, too, are in politics.  Meanwhile, umama is not an insult. Someone tells you “wacha umama”, they mean you should act like a man.  Men and women were created for each other but they are different. 

Jeff