foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] transformation [Music] Brazil [Music] project is foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] leukemia [Music] so we are at IHOP line Nairobi essentially what ihub is is we are an entrepreneur support organization we do that by offering them co-working space supporting them through our incubator acceleration activities and then organizing Community initiatives that are designed to bring people together just cause kosher and have some peer-to-peer learning do you know what type of startups we can find here like some examples mostly in around and get free check because of the fact that a lot of these are
still unfortunately still Advanced the second Trend would be startups that are focused on Logistics so last my delivery um given the fact that here in Kenya and many parts of Africa we do not have like a very unified address system so like when people order goods online getting it to that like doorstep is a bit challenging because we don't have in you know a detailed roadmap of the of the different urban areas and then third third the trend is regarding um Healthcare Innovations so again because Healthcare is essential and a lot of people don't have
access to adequate Healthcare a lot of innovators actually flocking to that space one good example that touches or even artificial intelligence is one startup by the name of neural labs and what they're doing is using machine learning and neural site to actually scan x-rays to actually determine if a sub patient has respiratory problems or a breast disease so yes those are the three key areas of fintech logistics and also Healthcare that's amazing we are coming from Brazil and it's so interesting to see because the problems are the same so maybe you can learn from you
guys that's really hopefully yeah foreign is it easy to get developers in Kenya um yeah we do have like a vibrant developer space however the developer blockage is you know a bit fragmented however you know hubs like I have hubs like other co-working spaces do a huge job to actually providing a space where these guys can actually form a community for instance is there a governmental support for Innovation for uh you know technology how is it working out yes we do have some government support but not as much as we had Mission intended for example
a lot of the funding that actually goes into the startup ecosystem here in Kenya comes from foreign foreigners and you know that that might be great at all however foreign foreigners have their own priorities their own goals that they're trying to push and those priorities might not necessarily align with the innovators so if we had you know enough government support that would actually you know be a bit better because again it would actually be funding local solutions by local innovators other than having like this over Reliance on the foreign attention to other markets or other
other sectors that might not be necessarily relevant to our Market hopefully in the next couple of years we might see our first unicorn coming out of East Africa hopefully Kenya fingers crossed but yeah yeah that's kind of like how the overarching view of the Silicon Savannah [Music] tonight foreign on the bus so ushahidi is a Global Tech non-profit organization we've been around for about 14 years the company's name comes from a Swahili what that means testimony which speaks to our Origins because the organization was founded right after the post-election violence that broke out in Kenya
in 2007. yes and many of us were stuck in our houses not knowing what was going on and there was a bit of a media ban as well so the ushahidi founder set up this web platform that made it easy for an ordinary citizen to just send in a text sending an email or a tweet or fill out our web form and have that information aggregated and visualized on a map we see ourselves as an organization that exists to empower ordinary citizens to solve problems in the communities through access to data in Tech and we
do that through building our open source technology platforms that make it very easy for them to collect massive amounts of data from underrepresented groups around different issues it could be crisis related issues human rights protection issues or even good governance and then use that to advocate for the change that they want to see lead to decision making that representative of their needs I remember when your Shahidi was created that it was really a blast in terms of innovation it really was because when you think back to that time when ushahidi was popping up you know
it's the Advent of social media and all of these platforms for self-expression this idea of having information flowing from the bottom up was really you know kind of exciting and new and here we were capitalizing on that but then also making use of technology that people have access to something as simple as a mobile phone and making that very easy for people to then kind of see that voice being raised and then using art for good so what are the features of ushahidi right now like practical examples of how you use the planet practical examples
of how we use them it's largely been used around the crisis response space all the examples would include the haitiative quick in 2011 there was the Japan earthquake but most recently actually the covid-19 pandemic for human rights protection there was harassment they were using it to document cases of women being sexually harassed in the streets of Egypt and they inspired a bunch of about 21 other different Maps using that as a way of trying to create awareness about some of the atrocities that are going on so that you move the conversation from is it happening
into what do we then do about it and most recently it was used during the black lives matter protest in the U.S in Portland I mean even for the Enzo's ones in Nigeria wow incredible and we were very inspirational for Brazilian initiatives as well like a Muriel nurses not sure if you heard of them but they pretty much got your template to to do it absolutely I think it's it's that idea of really lowering the barriers for people to interact with the tech so that aspect of being able to collect data from different streams just
helps to really diversify ensure that you can reach as many people as possible [Music] you have been a Pioneer in Innovation right in Kenya do you think that spark has caught fire somehow I think that spark that there's already a fire yeah because if you look back at the early days when ushahidi started you know we had a small community here at the ihub now there's so many Innovation hubs that are even under an umbrella body called affilabs there's a host of startups I think we've even gotten to the point where some of the conversations
we're having isn't about our capacity to solve problems with tech but really into how we getting access to the right kind of funding so that we're able to scale the project so Nairobi is definitely buzzing when it comes to Innovation how do you see yourself in Kenya in terms of innovation in the next 10 years 10 years from now things are always they're always changing I mean right now everybody is talking about the fourth Industrial Revolution there's a lot of conversations around Automation and machine learning and how to make it much easier and I know
that for us that's actually been a really big consideration we still have big challenges around natural disasters especially in this time when climate change is one of the most pressing issues in our world and the growing realization that solving problems in our world will take collaboration and in like interacting with the people who are directly affected I can see how we'll still always be there it is a matter of the how the things that we do to make that much easier the things we do or the things we build that will make it easier for
some of these groups to access based on their challenges and that's why we're still very much in touch with our communities we are very proactive about iterating around the the features that we're building with our audiences in mind foreign [Music] so this is a techno phone yeah which is easily accessible to the middleman here in Kenya yeah it goes for about 100 100 150 dollars I love it because it has it takes good photos and it's easily available for us it's not too expensive and not too expensive yeah and it's a brand that exists in
all Africa right it's an international brand yeah it is quite common here in Africa yes one thing that I heard is that it takes pictures of dark skin much better than other phones right but I let's do it [Music] is local [Music] news foreign foreign tropical uh uh masturbation [Music] Interiors um foreign foreign foreign praka [Music] foreign [Music] Africa [Music] foreign I think there needs to be a lot more integration between Brazil and Africa a huge portion of your population is African of African origin so I think that there's a natural you know connection there
Mozambique and angolan Angola would speak Portuguese and I think there's a need for that connection to happen but there's an opportunity for trade and investment that to happen both ways but it first starts by understanding each other things like this are helpful for people to understand there's a true picture in Africa and Africans need to understand as well what is going on in Brazil and then we need travel right Brazilians need to come to Africa Africans need to come to Brazil and then once you have those relationships amongst the people and then the governments as
well need to come together then I think we can really start to to learn from each other and to support each other in our development because many times innovations that are in conditions in the west are very different from conditions in developing economies like in Africa or in Brazil so we can learn from each other and there's some solutions that we have in Africa that can work in in Brazil and some solutions that work in Brazil that can work in Africa foreign I'm a Ghanaian I was born in Ghana when I was four and then
left there when I was four and moved to Gambia Botswana Zimbabwe South Africa Mauritius and these days I'm based in Nairobi Kenya so as a result of all this travel I developed an identity as an African not just as a Ghanaian and I fell in love with the continent of Africa the more I traveled the more I saw that the real wealth that we have in Africa is not a gold or diamonds or minerals but it's really our people there's a burgeoning startup ecosystem in Africa right where there are a lot of young people who
are learning the latest Technologies and coming up with new Ventures and the best way to develop Africa would be to develop our people Africa is a branding problem you know most people when they think of Africa they think of famine and warfare and you know Starving Children and things like that and they can't see it as a continent that is innovative and in fact many people don't know but Amazon web services was first developed in South Africa right and today the entire Cloud infrastructure that the world has would not have happened if it wasn't for
those South African software Engineers that sort of started in Africa but no one knows that you know the first heart transplant in the world was done in South Africa so there's a lot of innovation that has happened but it's not communicated it's not so The Branding of Africa needs to change we need to control the narrative better and different stories need to be told [Music] in terms of the potential for the knowledge economy Africa by the end of the century is going to be 40 of the world's population and by 2035 our Workforce will be
larger than China and India and Africa also has the youngest population in the world that means that the the talent that we have in Africa that can develop innovative solutions in the in this fourth Industrial Revolution is massive there's a huge potential for that you know young people are much more open to new technologies one of the things I really believe is that constraints drives Innovation and Africa has a lot of constraints so we have to reimagine and rethink everything foreign instruments [Music] the digital transformation has has been accelerated because of the covet pandemic so
as a result every business overnight is a technology business so there's a huge need for skills and globally there's estimate that the world will need 50 to 85 million people in technology jobs in the next 10 years so what is happening is that the rest of the world have realized that the only place they can find this Talent is in Africa so I've started to see a lot of global technology companies setting up operations in Africa so Google opened a center in Kenya to do software development they opened an AI Center in Ghana Amazon web
services is starting to do a lot of exciting things on the continent [Music] what's also happening is infrastructure in Africa is developing and therefore people can work remotely from from Africa to the rest of the world another trend is the coveted pandemic it suddenly made companies a lot more open to realizing that they can hire talents from anywhere in the world so 40 of our of Africa software Engineers today work outside of Africa remotely they sit in in their country and they are working for companies in the U.S and Europe and Latin America and so
forth the global technology companies are seeing that you know Africa is the next Frontier of um for technology time [Music] is um [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign
