Kenya, the Silicon Valley of Africa

The world is going through a new age of industrialization and innovations. With it a new era of Einsteins and Steve Jobs creating new tech and disrupting the socio-economic market. Africa, particularly Kenya, with its proud and ambitious nationals, is right there with the rest of the world. Kenya’s journey to position herself as the epicenter of innovation can be traced back to the year 2007. Kenya’s first major success came in 2007 with the wildly popular mobile money service, Mpesa. In March 2007. M-Pesa quickly captured a significant market share for cash transfers and grew to 17 million subscribers by December 2011 in Kenya alone. In the Fiscal Year 2019, 37 million active customers carried out over 11 billion transactions, averaging over 500 transactions every second. Mpesa is now available in 7 countries, has 37 Million active subscribers, and 396,000 agents spread across the 7 countries. The Kenyan government poured diesel on the flames in 2009 with TEAMS, the undersea fiber-optic cable that gave Kenyans cheap, reliable broadband—with average speeds faster than those in the US.