Contests and awards optimal platforms for growth in our innovations landscape

Kenya is among the most intelligent countries globally, and mega firms are seeking to further innovation growth through contests and awards.

These increasing activities that are taking place mostly in the country’s expansive hubs, to spur development from interested parties and hold a promise for future income-generating ventures.

During these contests, prospective developers and innovators have a chance to showcase their ideas to a panel of judges, who will then recommend the best innovations for funding, or assimilation by interested investors.

In April, Citi Bank asked software developers to submit and showcase their technology solutions, incorporating both web-based and mobile platforms under its initiative dubbed Citi Mobile Challenge EMEA. 

This initiative follows those piloted by Safaricom, Intel, Microsoft, Samsung and Ericsson amongst others. The common goal for them being to bring together young entrepreneurs to showcase their innovations to potential investors which can then be turned into business opportunities. 

The Intel‘s Tech to Market Accelerator program is a lean start up accelerator and business plan competition focused on software applications, while Safaricom’s Appwiz Challenge seeks to identify and develop mobile technology based companies.

These competitions and their subsequent ideas bring the added benefit of expanding financial inclusion, enabling new kinds of access to financial systems and services for previously-undeserved communities.

Latest reports by UN Habitat and World Bank notes that there are 17.3 million of internet users in Kenya, while the IT sector is experiencing a consistent and steady growth rate of 20 per cent annually since the year 2000.

This coupled with an expanding economic growth rate and increasing mobile penetration in the country, the numbers of developers, IT and business hubs are progressively on the rise.

In fact, according to the latest report by the Intelligent Community Forum, Nairobi was the only African city to appear on a shortlist of 21 technological hubs throughout the world for 2015 .It was listed as an intelligent community which means that the city of Nairobi is progressively building an inclusive, prosperous economy anchored by information and communication technologies.

As she garnered support for the continent’s top development bank, Cape Verde’s Finance and Economic Planning minister Christina Duarte said that use of competitions and grants is an optimal way of advancing and sustaining effort to develop and upgrade the continent’s capacity for Science, Technology and innovation to address its present and future problems. 

Although she lost the top post for African Development Bank to Nigerian Dr Akinwumi Adesina, she has a point. The time has come when we should learn how to build ecosystems within the country that promote innovation and these could include numerous aspects such as innovation awards, funding for research, industrial attachments, links between academics, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. 

Thus local startups should eye the competitions and grants as a way to boost their status globally, financially or otherwise. Of the finalists from 18 countries that participated in the Citi’s challenge, a significant number of shortlisted entries were from Kenya which clearly attests to the country’s innovation capacity worldwide. 

Though an innovation hub, Kenyan developers have made little or no progress even despite their gusto at the beginning, which is blamed on entrepreneurial ignorance, financial inability or patience to see their inventions through. 

The country has been famed world over for its M-Pesa innovation, and our developers and innovators should seek encouragement from the various innovations that have been encompassed and developed within this very platform that has made it the phenomenon it is today.  

It then makes sense to ride on ecosystems that have already been put in place to market our young innovations that promise to take the world by storm; such as the challenges and competitions set up by potential investors.

 Tony Mbugua is the Group General Manager, Fintech Kenya.