This is how award winning Kenyan IT college and software development firm was born

eMobilis MD Ken Mwendia. [PHOTOS: COLLINS KWEYU / STANDARD]

By KIBIWOTT KOROSS

An evening meeting Ken Mwendia, 37, and two friends had over a cup of coffee in a city hotel led to the birth of the eMobilis idea.

Most of their talk at the meeting four years ago concentrated on how everything was going digital and how M-Pesa was taking shape so fast in Kenya.

“It was just that casual talk that we discussed on how companies in the mobile telephone sector were competing for employees and we just thought of developing IT specialists,” he recalls.

Celtel (now Airtel) and Safaricom were in a warpath as there were few trained IT specialists locally. There were also only a few foreign specialists and companies started poaching staff from one another, raising their pay as demand increased. This made Mr Mwendia think about producing these specialists locally.

“IT became one of the best paying jobs, but the problem was only a few people who could work in the sector because there was no training and those who had been employed were tied to very strict contract terms,” he says.

Software development

There was demand by the mobile operators to develop mobile phone application software to boost their customer base.

And out of this, eMobolis Mobile Technology Institute was opened as an institution to train students and individuals on Mobile Software Development, as well as Network Infrastructure Management.

The training school has generated so many ideas, some yet to be implemented, that it has caught the attention of the World Bank.

eMobilis won a World Bank grant to set up a regional mobile technologies laboratory that also trains young people from poor backgrounds. In 2012, eMobilis won a competition for a $330,000 World Bank grant. The funding enabled it to host an East African mobile-phone research and development laboratory and serve as an incubator for start-up tech firms.

Google also chose eMobilis as a partner in a project to develop websites for small and mid-sized Kenyan companies. “We want to create opportunities for local talent by training them on mobile and wireless cellular technologies. We want to ensure local talent is available and trained to meet the growing opportunities in the mobile industry in Africa,” says Mwendia.

The institute is based at the third floor of Kippro Plaza, Westlands.

Brian Ondari, a mobile developer at Synergy Informatics, says with the coming up of colleges like eMobilis, Kenya has placed herself in the world map in terms of technology.

Millions of transactions

“The future of mobile is bright and promising. Africa and more so Kenya is now headed the mobile way. Every passing day a new mobile solution is launched in Kenya. This shows the potential that mobile has,” he said.

In terms of revenue, mobile is receiving millions of transactions per day. Not forgetting application stores receiving billions of downloads. “A time will come when everyone will be having a mobile device of his or her own,” adds Ondari, adding: “That is when it will melt down to a mobile solution for every day.”

Last year, two students from the centre won Sh700,000 in Rwanda during in an exhibition that attracted more than 500 young entrepreneurs from Rwanda, Ghana, South Africa and Kenya, organised by Athgo International, a firm dedicated to empowering the youth in the ICT field around the world. The Los Angeles, California based company seeks to bring together people from ages 18 to 32 with the tools, knowledge and support needed to conceive, develop, and launch constructive entrepreneurial ventures.

Mobile application development in Kenya is slowly gaining traction as players move to tap the growing pool of technology entrepreneurs.

The World Bank, in partnership with mobile handset maker, Nokia, the Finish Government and iHub Consortium, in 2011 opened a new incubation facility for entrepreneurs and innovators with a bias for mobile technology.

The facility is known as m-Lab East Africa to encourage innovation and competitiveness of small and medium enterprises in ICT. It will provide an enabling environment for innovators and entrepreneurs to convert their ideas into viable businesses. It is based at Bishop Magua Building, on Ngong Road, and is hosted by the iHub Consortium that includes Nairobi’s iHub, eMobilis, the World Wide Web Foundation and the University of Nairobi School of Computing and Informatics.

Mwendia says the training at eMobilis is tailored for school leavers and established professionals who want to be multi-skilled perhaps to improve their work environment or solve work-related problems using these apps.

The school currently has 200 students and Mwendia says they hope to increase the number in the next two years and open up more branches in various counties.

Susan Eve Oguya, who is the founder of m-farm, says she has managed to talk to farmers through SMS and on various issues ranging from markets of produce and new crop varieties.

She says: “At eMobilis, I learnt how to develop mobile applications and this led to my achievement of having a startup that is mobile SMS based application that assists farmers to get agricultural information”.

Transparency tool

Their main product M-Farm, is a transparency tool for Kenyan farmers where they simply SMS the number 20255 (Safaricom Users) to get information about the retail price of their products, buy their farm inputs directly from manufacturers at favorable prices, and find buyers for their produce.

One of the several SMS messages received by farmers is information like: “Stevia (commonly known as sugar leaf or sweet leaf) is a plant based sweetener known to be up to 30 times sweeter than table sugar. This plant has attracted the attention of investors in Kenya with its adoption set to spell doom to many sugar cane growers in our country.”

Mwendia says most of their students have been employed in almost all mobile phone operating companies, county governments and ICT companies.

He says: “We train students in Mobile Content Development, and at the end of the training, the students are able to sell their mobile content throughout Africa using our aggregator contracts.

They also learn how to create games, tools, screen-savers, themes, mobile inventory management systems, mobile car tracking systems, distributed gaming applications, mobile advertising tools, mobile reservation systems, business utilities and sell them after just three months of training.”

“The most interesting thing of being a mobile application developer is that you can earn money both as an entrepreneur, even when you are a student and you can be employed as well. It is a well paying industry,” he adds.